The Democratic Party is struggling mightily to figure out how to confront President Trump's staggering corruption. More and more of its members of Congress are getting behind the idea of an impeachment inquiry, but the party leadership is (somewhat mysteriously) trying desperately to avoid the issue. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has deployed one excuse after the next, most recently the absolutely preposterous theory that Trump is plotting to get himself impeached as part of a Snidely Whiplash-esque scheme. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has less power but greater freedom, is all but absent from the entire discussion.

Here's a suggestion: Democrats need to remember how playground bullying works. Trump is an enormous crook, yes, but he is also an overgrown petulant child. To fight him, Democrats should imagine him as a spoiled, lazy, entitled, none-too-bright 9-year-old who likes to kick puppies and kittens.

The first rule of bullies is that they are drawn to perceived weakness. No bully wants to try to pick on someone bigger and stronger than they are — they want to terrorize weak and helpless people who won't fight back. The point is the psychological satisfaction of easy domination, not brawling for its own sake. Indeed, most bullies are not actually very good at fighting, and will fold immediately if faced with a real physical confrontation.

But when it turned out Democrats were too scared of their own shadow to actually pursue the impeachment inquiry that Mueller teed up for them (in addition to Trump's unprecedented and wildly unconstitutional profiteering off the presidency), Trump's bully instincts surged right back. He sensed, correctly, that he could continue to push around Democrats — and so instructed his subordinates to disobey congressional subpoenas, told his treasury secretary to keep his tax returns secret, and submitted lawsuits arguing Congress has no right to investigate anything he does.

The lesson here is that timidity and handwringing only encourages Trump. If they don't confront him with tactics just as aggressive as the ones he uses, he will conclude they are cowards who can be cowed easily. Now, attacking on all fronts might not stop Trump from trying to break the law — even a fearful bully can fight when cornered — but it's a bare minimum requirement at least.

The second rule of bullies is that they are insecure. They often harm others to soothe their sense of inadequacy, like the potential police officer "whose paranoia and inferiority complex constantly haunt him, leading him to lash out at others in order to convince them he is in control." Trump is one of the most spoiled people who has ever lived — a man whose every whim was indulged by his real estate tycoon father, who gave Trump hundreds of millions of dollars tax-free and constantly bailed out his failed real estate projects. When the wolves were finally at the door in the early 2000s, Trump was rescued once again by NBC to create The Apprentice. This divergence between self-image and constant failure no doubt breeds an ocean of insecurity.

As Deadspin's David J. Roth writes, Trump's "one deeply held belief that has been evident throughout his whole faithless disgrace of a life is people should be talking about Donald Trump more, on television, and he has just about seen that part through." He's so narcissistic and needy it would be pathetic, if it weren't for the gruesome consequences of his holding power.

Trump is not some evil genius masterminding the overthrow of American democracy. As Albert Burneko writes, "he is a soft, breathless, foam-boned inheritance baby with a brain like a wet saltine cracker, because he has been crippled and made monstrous by money and endless permission and therefore cannot conceive of there being any truth or morality beyond what he wants right now[.]" He did not plan to win the presidency, and still has no idea what to do with it or even how it works.

But on the other hand, insecure bullies are pretty easy to bait into foot-stamping tantrums — especially if you drill into their sources of self-worth, which in Trump's case would be his business record. Impeachment hearings would of necessity have to focus on his financial records, which would no doubt find a lot of appalling mismanagement and fraud.

At any rate, I'd guess there is almost no chance that the Democratic leadership will listen to any of this. They give every indication of actually being the cowards Trump thinks they are. They are enormously privileged themselves, and such people are often bewildered by outright personal confrontation (as opposed to traditional rich people passive-aggression or gossiping behind people's backs). And that's when they aren't taking the opportunity to sneak through legislation their big donor supporters want, like a bizarre bill from Pelosi that would allow Trump to claim he is cutting drug prices but achieve little.

If Democrats actually want to protect American democracy from Trump, they're going to have to remember how to throw a punch.

In films, one way of instantly signaling a quaint, old-fashioned setting is with a milkman. A trusty, white-clad man dropping off a fresh set of milk bottles and picking up the old ones says 1920s just as clearly as a title card.

However (as with many modern so-called conveniences), the way a milkman treated glass bottles is objectively far superior to how they are treated today. Whether it's for milk, beer, soda, water, or any other consumer use, it's time to bring back reusable glass bottles.

Now, the major reason milkmen existed back then was because refrigerators were rare, and so daily deliveries were necessary because milk would spoil within a day or so. That circumstance obviously doesn't apply today.

No, the lasting genius of the milkman system was that you could use the same bottles over and over and over. Instead of having to dig up new raw materials for every bottle (typically sand, sodium carbonate, lime, magnesium oxide, and aluminum oxide) to process, or crunch up a bunch of old bottles and melt them down, you just wash out the old ones and fill them right back up. They will break or wear out eventually, but with any luck you can get 10 or more uses out of a fresh one.

Recycling glass as many already do isn't pointless, of course. Crushing up old bottles creates what bottlers call "cullet," which is considerably more energy efficient than raw starting materials for making new glass (plus it can be recycled infinitely without any loss in quality). But the difference isn't that large, because you still have to carry out most of the energy-intensive melting processes — meaning an energy savings of only about 13 percent relative to new glass. Aluminum is far better in recycling terms, because smelting it from raw bauxite ore requires a tremendous amount of energy — meaning a 92 percent energy savings for recycled cans relative to new ones.

All that changes when we start talking about re-use. For every time a glass bottle is washed out and sent back, its energy cost can be spread out over another use. A British study of soda distribution found that reusing a glass bottle just once would cut its climate footprint by 40 percent, and reusing it three times would make it about equivalent to aluminum cans and plastic bottles. After 10 reuses the decline has largely tapered off, as the energy cost of washing and transport begin to predominate. Here are carbon dioxide equivalents plotted for the number of times a bottle is used:

Now, as is common with efficiency programs, the details matter a great deal, and the government would have to play a big role in making a modern milkman system happen. States or the feds would need to mandate that all bottlers use one of a few simple shapes and sizes (which would have to be a bit sturdier and heavier), so they can be produced as efficiently as possible and would all fit the same washing machinery. Industrial policy would have to ensure that all regions of the country have reasonable access to reprocessing facilities, so bottles don't have to be shipped back and forth thousands of miles at great energy cost. Then government would require a hefty deposit on each one — say fifty cents to a dollar, depending on size — to ensure that people actually bring them back.

But it certainly could be done. It's a simple and straightforward way to start cutting down climate emissions and raw materials usage while still allowing people to drink their milk, wine, beer, or soda.

Indeed, this should be viewed as just a first step in totally overhauling the American recycling system. We are (as usual) far behind Europe in this regard — Germany is reportedly the best in the world, recycling about 65 percent of its waste according to the OECD, nearly twice as much as our 35 percent. (Other studies have different figures, but by all accounts the U.S. is far behind the leaders.)

It's easier in the short term to have an incredibly wasteful society, where people enjoy their beverages and then discard the packaging. But the long-term consequences are large and increasingly apparent. Of course, the beverage industry is only a few percentage points at most of the emissions total, and packaging is only part of that fraction as well. But good climate policy will require carefully rooting around the entire society to plug up every little source of senseless waste to make every part of life as efficient as possible. Bringing back reusable bottles is a good place to start.

One of the worst neurotic tics in liberal policymaking has an extremely boring name: the phase-in schedule. It refers to how programs like the Child Tax Credit pay nothing to people who have no labor income, but phases in as people make more money working. For instance, a new proposal from Leonard Berman of the Tax Policy Center for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit would double someone's labor income up to a benefit level of $10,000, after which it would plateau infinitely.

Phase-ins are perhaps the single most idiotic and unjustifiable idea in the entire liberal policy toolkit, and that is saying a lot. They must be killed.

The first and biggest problem here is that phase-ins deliberately exclude the poorest people in the country. Poverty in the U.S. is overwhelmingly caused by people being unable to work, because capitalist institutions only distribute income to workers and owners of capital. As a result, a huge super-majority of poor people are either children, students, disabled, unemployed, or caring for someone else. Berman bizarrely calls his idea a "universal" EITC, but in reality requiring labor income to claim it renders the population most in need of help ineligible. It's a moral atrocity.

Second, phase-ins make programs less effective, more complicated, and more expensive to administer. You need both a surveillance bureaucracy, to make sure people in the phase-in zone aren't claiming improper benefits, and an education program, to get eligible people aware of the benefit. All that means spending money on administration instead of benefits — while others don't get the benefit at all. About 20 percent of people who could get the existing EITC do not (though it is a lot more complicated than Berman's proposal, to be fair).

There is not even the meager benefit of increasing labor supply. For a while it was thought that a big expansion of the EITC in the '90s boosted the labor force participation rate of single women with children, but as the People's Policy Project's Matt Bruenig writes, new research shows this was almost certainly a fluke. Multiple other state-level EITC expansions did not have this effect, and it's hard to imagine regular people understanding its hideously complicated eligibility schedule anyway. In any case, encouraging single mothers to work without universal free child care in place is not necessarily a good thing. Too many mothers already are forced to leave their kids in their cars or dangerous cheap daycare centers because they must work.

It's not hard to guess where phase-ins come from. Basic capitalist ideology, from the days of David Ricardo to neoliberal thinkers today, requires that "'you shall earn your bread in sweat' — unless you happen to have private means." In this framework, welfare income is assumed to be less legitimate than labor income, and poverty is assumed to be always caused by laziness or a lack of skills. Therefore, paying welfare to people who do not work at all will only encourage shirking. This kind of thinking has long had a death grip on the ideology of both parties — witness President Clinton, who sounded just like Paul Ryan in 1996 when announcing that his welfare reform bill would help poor people earn "a paycheck, not a welfare check."

Even after welfare reform was revealed as a catastrophic disaster, liberals are still timidly excluding poor people from their welfare proposals. It's pathetic.

This policy discussion desperately needs an injection of social-democratic confidence. The Nordic countries demonstrate beyond question that a clean, efficient welfare state is built on straightforward, universal programs. Poor people get the goodies they need, and there is little need for surveillance and education because everyone is automatically eligible. Distributional issues, like rich people benefiting too much from any program, are dealt with in the proper way — in the tax code. Instead of cutting the rich out of every program individually (costing lots of money and effort), their taxes are just nudged up across the board. The resulting programs are politically stronger, far simpler to explain and sell, and far easier to administer.

The United States, by contrast, has by far the worst welfare system in the rich world. Our obsession with obscure tax credits and fear of simple welfare payments makes it both meager, full of holes, and extremely expensive — costing nearly as much as Sweden's welfare state in percentage of GDP while offering nowhere near the benefits. If we could redirect existing spending in sane ways, America would be a much better place to live. Let's start by destroying the phase-ins.

Over the past two decades, education reform has been a major topic of debate and policymaking, from President Bush's No Child Left Behind bill to President Obama's Race to the Top initiative. Reforms have generally followed the pattern of adapting mechanisms from the for-profit business world to "fix" supposedly broken aspects of the public education system: weakening teacher unions, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, tying teacher pay to test score results, and so on.

Yet there is one idea that was once a major focus of reform efforts, but has been set aside for years: racial desegregation.

That is, until now. Last week, Bernie Sanders released a plan to revitalize school integration efforts. It's both an excellent plan and brings attention to a vitally important racial justice issue.

Historical context is important here. For a couple decades after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the federal government put real effort into forcing school districts to integrate their populations. The main objective was to equalize educational opportunity, particularly in the South. Stuffing black populations into crummy, under-resourced institutions was one of the major mechanisms of the Jim Crow apartheid system — but if white and black children went to the same schools, then they should receive education of a similar quality (or at least a lot closer than before).

Because cities across the nation were (and remain) extremely segregated, and whites violently resisted any attempt to integrate actual neighborhoods, the only realistic option was using transportation to achieve a decent demographic mix. But this led to an enormous white backlash across the country.

It turned out northern schools were just as segregated as southern ones, if not worse, and northern whites were not any keener on integration than southern ones — indeed, an integration plan in Boston sparked violent riots. Centrist triangulators like then-Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), seized on the issue, teaming up with southern segregationists to beat back integration efforts. (In 1977 Biden wrote to Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland of Mississippi: "I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week's committee meeting in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote.")

It's key to understand that the rhetoric of the anti-integration backlash was total nonsense. Biden (along with infamous racists like George Wallace and Louise Day Hicks) called integration "forced busing," portraying it as a simple defense of the traditional neighborhood school.

In reality, as historian Matt Delmont writes in Why Busing Failed, busing has always been common in schools, and had been used as a key tool of segregation itself prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, the very plaintiff in Brown vs. Board of Education was a girl who was bused 20 miles to a black school when she lived just four blocks from a white one. Integration sometimes meant children being transported to a far-off school, but not always. Conversely, long-distance busing is still common today — nobody complains when their kid gets a slot in a high-status, distant magnet school. What whites really objected to (then and now) was their children attending school with blacks. It's a simple as that.

The educational benefits of integration are large. One study found that "for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status; desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes."

Conversely, as this Tampa Bay Timesinvestigation shows, when one Florida county got out from under a federal desegration order in 2007, they immediately re-segregated their schools — warehousing most of their poor black population in five schools, and starving them of resources. They quickly plunged from average or above-average in quality to some of the worst in the entire state, with 95 percent of students failing reading or math.

So what would Sanders do? He would end the prohibition on funding desegregation transport (a relic from that 1970's backlash), provide several pots of money to encourage schools to desegregate, triple funding support for the poorest schools, expand funding for minority teacher education, ramp up desegregation orders, and provide more money for school construction and maintenance, (as well as several other policies not directly related to desegregation). It's an excellent start, to say the least.

A Biden spokesman, by contrast, told CNN that Biden stands by his segregationist record.

Other 2020 Democrats have so far largely avoided the topic. Only Julian Castro has offered a plan to combat school segregation, but only through integrating neighborhoods, which while a worthy goal (ideally, both should be done) would be both more difficult and take much longer.

Now, integration is not a panacea; a disproportionate number of African-American children still come from impoverished families or face other problems rooted in systemic racism. And the biggest overall problem with American education is certainly America's hideous income inequality, as household income is very closely correlated with educational achievement. But integration does prevent them from being stuffed into essentially fake schools where rich white elites can simply let them drown — and it doesn't harm white children either.

It's also true that the federal government's power over the school system is not that great, as most power is still exercised locally. But a committed president could still achieve a lot, and more still with the support of Congress. School integration has been outside the main political discussion for a long time, and it's long since time we started talking about it again.

Bernie Sanders deserves enormous credit for bringing it back on the national radar and offering a meaningful plan to address it.

Last month, The Los Angeles Times published a devastating exposé of one of the problems dragging down the California high-speed rail project: consultants. The state had only 10 employees to oversee the project in 2008 when work started, but the rail authority figured they could save money and time by hiring consultants to do basically the entire project. The result was the precise opposite: awesome delays and cost bloat, with the project 13 years behind schedule and $44 billion over budget.

This demonstrates a fundamental problem with modern American governance — lack of basic state capacity. A government must have in-house expertise if it is to undertake difficult, complicated projects. The first step to getting some is to stop this reliance on private companies to do the state's job for it.

California is far from the first community to see big projects brought down by a strangling kudzu of incompetent or corrupt consultants. Texas, for instance, has a huge social wealth fund (seeded mainly by oil money) created way back in 1854 to provide money for schools. As this major series of articles in the Houston Chronicle details, it was managed quite well by state employees until about 25 years ago, when private equity and other investment consulting firms were brought in to supposedly improve performance. The result was a giant increase in fees, worse fund performance, less money for students, and what looks like naked corruption, with billions of fund money reportedly invested in well-connected companies.

Elsewhere, Newark undertook a massive overhaul of its school system along charter school lines several years ago, funded in part by a $100 million donation from Mark Zuckerberg. The reforms largely failed, and a giant chunk of the money quickly vanished into the pockets of insider consultants making a thousand bucks a day. Oakland schools were taken over by the California state government in 2003, which farmed out management to consultants. When the city got back control in 2009, enrollment had plunged and debt tripled.

The Denver transportation authority recently decided to operate a new train line itself, after years of bungling from the private firm operating three other lines.

Defense spending is also absolutely rife with this kind of incompetence and waste — witness the USS Gerald Ford, an aircraft carrier built by Northrup Grumman for $13 billion and counting, making it the most expensive warship in history. It's now over two years behind schedule and 22 percent over budget, and still had major problems with its munitions elevators and propulsion system when it was tested in March, requiring another three-month delay for retrofitting. Or consider Transdigm, a private equity firm that scooped up multiple military parts suppliers, and according to a recent Pentagon inspector general report, raked in excess profits on 98 out of 100 parts surveyed to the tune of 95 to 9,380 percent. (They charge $4,631 for a half-inch drive pin that should cost $46.)

At any rate, the ideology behind the consulting boom is classic neoliberalism — an ingrained belief that society must subordinate itself to the self-regulating market, and that government functions should be outsourced or privatized wherever possible. The results speak for themselves.

Now, there is nothing wrong in principle with government hiring private firms for certain tasks. Other countries do it all the time — hiring engineering companies to design projects, construction firms to build them, and so on. Indeed, the U.S. itself did this at a vast scale in the 1930s with the Public Works Administration, which hired private companies to build high-quality projects across the nation, like the Grand Coulee Dam and the Lincoln Tunnel.

But the state must still keep a tight grip on those firms, providing clear guidance and strong oversight to make sure the jobs are done properly and at a decent price — and often, it makes perfect sense for the state to just do the project itself. Conversely, as we see today, if government is inept, ignorant, or timid, consultants and contractors will simply line their own pockets and turn in shoddy, overpriced work.

State confidence and oversight capacity has plainly eroded away (or been deliberately destroyed) in all levels of American government over the decades. If we want the U.S. to be able to handle basic tasks like running a subway — let alone carry out the total economic overhaul demanded by the threat of climate change — Americans will have to rediscover the thinking and traditions that produced people like FDR's Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who kept a close watch on PWA programs.

New York's beleaguered Metropolitan Transit Authority recently decided to award a $3.75 million contract to the consulting firm AlixPartners to find ways to restructure its bureaucracy and cut costs. This is exactly the kind of thing a government agency should be able to do itself — indeed, the recent explosion of overtime payments at the MTA was directly caused by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's Subway Action Plan and hiring freeze at the agency (which is controlled by the governor). But so long as you have scheming incompetent politicians like him running the show, that's just the kind of performance you get.

The ongoing crisis in Venezuela has been somewhat displaced from international news by President Trump ratcheting up conflict with Iran. Yet the U.S. is still involved — on Wednesday, Trump's Department of Homeland Security banned all commercial and cargo flights between Venezuela and the U.S. On Thursday, D.C. cops and federal officials barged into the Venezuelan embassy and arrested four protesters who had been living there for months in protest of American support for overthrowing the Venezuelan government.

So it's as good a time as any to go over just what is going on in Venezuela.

The immediate context here was a coup attempt from Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela's National Assembly (akin to the speaker of the House), who proclaimed himself president in January, and was immediately recognized as such by the U.S. and given some American support. In late April, Guaidó attempted to foment an uprising to oust incumbent President Nicolás Maduro, but neither large popular protests nor expected military defections materialized, and forces loyal to Maduro put down the effort easily. Afterwards, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared: "Military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United States will do."

The broader context is an ongoing economic crisis which has been getting worse for years — long before this current crisis. Venezuela has unwisely become heavily dependent on oil exports (not using them to build up a sovereign wealth fund, as Norway has done), and was hit badly by the oil price decline in 2014. Worse, many insiders close to Maduro have gamed the currency exchange system, exploiting preferential dollar exchange rates to sell dollars on the black market for a profit. The result was shortages, hunger, steadily increasing inflation, and an explosion of emigration.

Maduro became deeply unpopular, but clung to power with classic caudillo tactics. Opposition parties won control of the National Assembly in 2015, but Maduro called for a new constitution, creating a new constituent assembly in an election that was boycotted by opposition parties. The constituent assembly, stacked with Maduro loyalists, duly declared that the National Assembly no longer had any legislative powers, and banned the major opposition parties from participating in new presidential elections in 2018. (One poll found that 61 percent of Venezuelans thought the new constitutional body was "illegal and illegitimate.") Naturally, Maduro won easily — helped along by the implicit threat that people who voted against him would lose their government benefits.

It's a grim situation — but on the other hand, there is no legal basis for Guaidó to declare himself president, nor any reason to be sure he would not try the exact same tactics to hold onto power himself, given how he has aligned himself with Trump. Coming to power via a military coup backed by a hostile foreign government is arguably worse than rigging an internal election.

Moreover, the U.S. has made things far worse by meddling in Venezuelan affairs and ratcheting up sanctions. First President Obama denied visas and froze assets held in America for seven Venezuelan officials in 2015, which accomplished little aside from a small bump in Maduro's popularity. Trump has dramatically stepped up the sanctionsseveral times, squeezing the collapsing Venezuelan economy even further. And now that even commercial and cargo flights are banned from the U.S., the noose is tighter still. An epidemic of hunger grips the country.

Meanwhile, this economic strangulation allows Maduro to claim with some justice he is only protecting Venezuela from "Yankee imperialism." The taint of American involvement — especially given the blood-drenched history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America — even has some opposition groups hesitant to accept American aid. After Guaidó said he was considering asking for a U.S. military intervention on May 5, the Venezuelan Supreme Court stripped immunity from numerous opposition lawmakers and charged them with treason (though not Guaidó himself).

That sort of careful diplomacy is just what the situation calls for — a negotiated settlement that would head off a civil war, schedule new elections, end the sanctions, and allow Venezuela to start putting itself back together. It's an open question whether Norway can pull it off. But one thing is for sure — continuing violent meddling from the blundering American colossus can only make it worse. The best thing the U.S. can do is stay out of Venezuelan affairs.

The Trump administration is seemingly gearing up for a war on Iran. First President Trump unilaterally reneged on the nuclear deal with that country — despite the fact that Iran was holding to its side of the bargain, and indeed has continued to do so despite the American betrayal. Now the Trump regime is ratcheting up tensions some more, in what is pretty clearly a ham-fisted attempt to gin up casus belli for invasion.

The New York Times reports that administration officials, led by national security adviser and slavering warmonger John Bolton — have drawn up plans to deploy a force of 120,000 troops "should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons[.]" That comes on the heels of the U.S. sending a carrier strike group and long-range bombers to the area in early May, and the administration blaming recent minor attacks on Saudi tankers and other oil infrastructure on Iran without any evidence. One anonymous official confirmed to the Times that the "ultimate goal of the yearlong economic sanctions campaign ... was to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the U.S."

War with Iran is a monstrous and illegal idea, which could very well turn out disastrously for the U.S. itself. Trump cannot be allowed to start another war of aggression.

The important context here is that France, the U.K., Germany, China, and the European Union itself are still party to the nuclear deal with Iran. Since Trump's abrogation of the deal and re-imposition of sanctions was utterly unjustified, Iran wants the remaining partners to hold up their end of the deal and find a way around U.S. sanctions. If they don't, the Iranian government is threatening (with perfect justice) to break the deal and start holding on to its enriched uranium.

How might this work? As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman write, the major vector of sanctions against Iran happen through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a Belgian cooperative that facilitates most international bank transactions. SWIFT is located in Europe, but because most such transactions are denominated in dollars, the U.S. has enormous leverage over it. Cutting Iran out of the system, as happened in 2012, badly damaged the Iranian banking system and economy.

However, that round of sanctions happened with the agreement of Europe. By contrast, the E.U. legally forbade European countries from complying with Trump's new sanctions. The law had no teeth and SWIFT complied with Trump, but the E.U. has since developed a "Special Purpose Vehicle" which allows for transactions between Iran and Europe. So far it has only been used for humanitarian trade, but it could easily be used for normal trade as well. Indeed, it could well be the first step in Europe (perhaps along with China) developing an alternative financial infrastructure which would break U.S. control over international transactions. So all this belligerent aggression may well break the sanctions infrastructure Trump loves so much (though that would probably be a good thing at this point, to be fair).

More importantly, launching an unprovoked invasion of Iran would be illegal. Wars of aggression are categorically forbidden under the U.N. Charter, which was duly passed by the Senate and is thus constitutionally binding. There is not even any enabling legislation as there was with Iraq in 2002.

America also has zero significant international support. On the contrary, a top U.K. general said he saw no increased risk from Iran or its proxies, and Spain pulled its frigate out of the carrier strike group headed to Iran in protest. On balance, Iran is acting with remarkable restraint given blatant U.S. provocation, backstabbing, and bullying.

It's also worth noting, once again, that Iran has a far more formidable military than Saddam Hussein's rattletrap battalions in 2003. As former U.S. Army General John Abazaid has said, Iranian forces are the strongest in the Middle East outside of Israel. It also has more than twice the population and nearly four times the landmass of Iraq, with much more rugged terrain — allowing for more effective guerrilla tactics, as American forces have learned at great cost in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the Pentagon itself conducted war games simulating a conflict with Iran in 2002. The "Iranian" commander, General Paul K. Van Riper, noting American dominance of electronic communications, used motorcycle couriers to transmit messages and lights to land planes without radio. When U.S. naval forces arrived with a surrender ultimatum, Riper launched a surprise mass missile attack that sank a carrier and 15 other ships — causing 20,000 virtual casualties in minutes. Then he launched a swarm attack of small boats, and sank several more ships.

Naturally, the top brass responded by restarting the exercise and granting cheat codes to the "American" side so they could not lose. Riper quit in the middle of the exercise, and later commented that "it simply became a scripted exercise. They had a predetermined end, and they scripted the exercise to that end."

Now, Iran might well fold easily in the face of a U.S. assault. But their force structure closely resembles the Riper model, largely based around asymmetric combat. Their navy has few conventional ships, but swarms of small, heavily-armed fast attack boats, mines, mini-submarines, and disguised civilian ships. U.S. ships would no doubt be able to pick off many of them, but it would only take a few lucky torpedo hits to sink even the largest vessels.

The American military clearly has a bad case of imperial arrogance. Americans in general have become used to easily steamrolling conventional forces, and only suffering relatively few combat deaths even in counterinsurgency wars. But if Iran were to sink just the carrier flagship in the strike group, over 6,000 sailors and airmen could be killed. That's nearly a quarter more U.S. military personnel than have died in the entire Iraq War — and it could easily be far, far worse. Many times that number might die in a prolonged war and occupation — not to mention the untold thousands of innocent Iranians who would die for no reason at all. Only a blustering, bloodthirsty idiot like John Bolton could dismiss such a risk.

If the United States weren't so powerful it would be seen for what it is — a rogue state and a threat to international peace. But at least we Americans can try to stop a horrifying disaster before it starts.

Joe Biden is leading the Democratic primary by a wide margin — nearly 27 points, according to the latest polling average. So what would he do on the most important problem facing America and humanity writ large? On climate change, Reuters reports that Biden wants a "middle ground approach" to appeal to both liberals and blue-collar Trump voters, whose "backbone … will likely include the United States re-joining the Paris Climate Agreement and preserving U.S. regulations on emissions and vehicle fuel efficiency," plus support for nuclear, natural gas, and carbon capture.

It hardly needs to be said that this "approach" is pathetically inadequate for dealing with climate change. And if Biden is elected, the timidity and learned helplessness of the Democratic rank-and-file might just have wrecked the global climate.

The problem with Biden's climate agenda, obviously, is that it isn't aggressive enough. Top climate scientists agree that the world has to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — that would be two years from the end of a Biden presidency, if he wins two terms — to stay under 1.5 degrees of warming, and fully to zero by 2050. How to allocate those cuts is a tricky question, but given that the United States is responsible for a plurality of past emissions, and would find green upgrades considerably easier than most countries due to our wealth and inefficiency, it only makes sense for the U.S. to cut even faster than that.

Essentially, what we must do to preserve a global climate is hack down our emissions as fast as we possibly can, and conduct a crash research program into zero-carbon agriculture, transportation, and industry as part of a coordinated similar effort with other countries, above all China and India. We may or may not be able to hit those targets, but every tenth of a degree of warming headed off means lower seas, less catastrophic weather, fewer crop failures, fewer climate refugees, and so on.

And while there's nothing wrong with efficiency regulations and re-joining the Paris Climate accords (indeed, the latter is a vital necessity), any support for natural gas is a disaster. Oil and gas companies have been pushing natural gas as a greener alternative to coal, but it turns out that when you account for methane leaks, it's just as bad in climate terms, if not worse (because methane is 28-36 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat). Unless carbon capture can be worked out — which would require standing up a multi-trillion-dollar giant industrial complex based on tentative demonstration projects — natural gas must be extirpated as a fuel source.

Whereas the Green New Deal supported by progressive democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib starts with a science-based goal and works out policies to get there, Biden simply assumes that whatever is roughly in the middle of the political road (as he defines it) is the best, as so-called moderates are always doing. By this blinkered ideology, the Green New Deal is simply wrong by definition. In a way, Biden's approach is akin to climate denial — not of the science, but of its obvious implications.

So why is Biden doing so well with Democratic voters — who agree climate change is one of the most important issues in the 2020 campaign — if he is plainly not up to the task of tackling the most severe problem that has ever threatened the U.S.? Jonathan Chait points to his popularity among Democrats as proof that the party's move to the left has been badly overstated. "Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate."

There is surely some truth to this. Most Democrats are not card-carrying Democratic Socialists of America members, and many have a great deal of affection for the Wall Street bailout artist Barack Obama.

However, Chait omits a significant part of what's going on. Biden's support is pretty clearly rooted in the perception that he will be the strongest candidate against Trump. Fully 40 percent of Democrats say winning in 2020 is more important than a candidate agreeing with them on the issues. When the Progressive Change Campaign Committee polled their members, co-founder Adam Green found that "[b]arely a majority of Biden’s own current supporters believe he would be the best Democratic president."

It's true that most Democrats are not socialists. But they are still fond of Bernie Sanders, who scores 78 percent approval among party members. What they are above all is frightened and confused. They despise Trump, desperately want him out of office, and think Biden is the safest choice.

As Alex Pareene writes, this attitude has been trained into the Democratic base by several generations of party leadership, who are firmly convinced that the electorate is much more conservative than it really is. People like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer see George McGovern and 1972 behind every blade of grass and conclude that things like the Green New Deal can never pass in the U.S. — which conveniently fits right in with their alignment with major corporate interests and big dollar donors.

Despite the "safe" choice backfiring spectacularly in 2016, many Democrats are doubling down. The result might well be a nominee who will fail in our last real chance to meet the challenge of climate change.

Joe Biden is having no trouble raising money. In just one single evening last Wednesday, he raked in a cool $700,000 at a California fundraiser, where he hobnobbed with Hollywood bigshots like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Terry Press.

This suggests a possible serious problem for the former vice president. Money is useful in politics, especially in such a profoundly corrupt society as the United States. But where that money comes from still matters. What's more, there is surely a point of diminishing returns — or even negative returns, where more money harms a campaign. Biden evinces no sign of having learned from the money problems of Hillary Clinton.

One surprising aspect of the 2016 campaign was that Clinton absolutely crushed Trump in the money race. She and her super PACs raked in nearly $1.2 billion, while Trump and associated operations raised just short of $650 million. She did this largely by cutting back on campaigning and spending much of her time zipping from one glitzy fundraiser to the next. As The New York Timesreported in September 2016, in just the last two weeks of August she raised $50 million in 22 fundraisers:

If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech. [The New York Times]

Despite his smaller cash hoard, the Trump campaign did more events than Clinton in every single swing state except Florida — 31 from Trump compared to 24 from Clinton in North Carolina, 28 to 26 in Pennsylvania, 30 to 18 in Ohio, 18 to 5 in Virginia, 14 to 8 in Michigan, and 9 to 5 in Wisconsin. Despite his total lack of political experience, Trump still seemed to spend his money with far more tactical savvy than the Clinton campaign, with its vast battalions of so-called data experts.

Indeed, a big fraction of that money likely hurt Clinton in the end. In addition to distracting her from a traditional campaign, it also made her appear — with considerable accuracy, frankly — as a tool of the rich. It jammed up her campaign messaging as being the candidate of the poor and working class, making her look like just another Democrat who talks a big game about inequality while quietly reassuring the big money donors behind closed doors that there is nothing to worry about.

Conversely, all this played directly into Trump's narrative that he was free of this corruption due to funding his own campaign. In one of his bizarre bursts of insight, he described the way people get subtly corrupted by big donor fundraisers with perfect accuracy in 2015: "That is the way it is. Somebody gives them money, not anything wrong, just psychologically, when they go to that person, they're going to do it," he said on CNN. "They owe them. And by the way, they may therefore vote negatively toward the country. That's not going to happen with me."

Of course, Trump was lying. He did not entirely fund his own campaign. But Clinton scurrying from one pack of oligarchs to the next for the whole campaign played directly into his "Drain the Swamp" messaging.

By contrast, this cycle Trump is fully embracing the big donors and super PACs that he previously condemned. Corporate interests, enjoying their enormous tax cuts, are no doubt extremely stoked for him to win another term.

This creates an opportunity for the Democratic nominee to characterize Trump as a corrupt hypocrite — a liar who works hand-in-glove with American oligarchs to keep taxes low and regulations down. This would work perfectly with the very successful fundraising model that Bernie Sanders has innovated. As of the last filing period, he had raised more than any other candidate, with $20.7 million (though Biden is probably close by now). Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are not far behind using similar tactics. Democrats could have their money cake and eat it too — running a well-funded campaign without the stench of corruption that comes from glad-handing plutocrats day in and day out. On the other hand, it will be much harder to make that case if the nominee is raising tons of cash from the same types of people Trump is going to.

The challenge of the Sanders model is that it requires credibility. Small donors are much more willing to step up when it's part of a genuine promise to get corporate influence out of politics. One might conclude that Biden doesn't want that, because he is perfectly fine with the status quo. It's almost as if he's served as a bag man for Delaware corporations for his entire Senate career, and would rather forego a potentially powerful political weapon against Trump than give up big-dollar fundraising. But that surely can't be it.

In discussions about abolishing the Electoral College, supporters return time and time again to the plight of small states like Wyoming or Mississippi. "Ditch the Electoral College, and Small States Will Suffer," reads the title of an article by Tara Ross.

The Electoral College does give disproportionate mathematical weight to small states. But its goofy structure means almost all of them are ignored in presidential politics. If the president was elected by simple majority vote, almost all small states would get more attention than they currently do.

We can examine this quantitatively. The organization FairVote compiled all the election campaign events in 2016, while the National Popular Vote movement (the one Ross is complaining about above) summarized it in handy form. The 2016 candidates spent almost all their time in a handful of states, most of them medium or large. Two-thirds of campaign events happened in just six states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Michigan. If we include Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Arizona, then those 12 states account for 96 percent of campaign events.

The nine smallest states (including D.C.), meanwhile, got precisely zero attention. Only the tenth-largest, New Hampshire, got any events at all. In total, 25 states (mostly small and medium-sized) got no events whatsoever. And while it's true the states that got huge attention are mostly on the big side, the very largest states were almost totally ignored as well — California and Texas got one event apiece, and New York none.

The reason for this is obvious. Almost every state gives all of its electoral votes to whoever wins the state — allowing candidates to take the votes of strongly partisan states for granted. Indeed, it's actively foolish to campaign where you are guaranteed to win or lose — only the swing states matter. It would be a waste of resources for a Democrat to campaign in California or Kentucky, or for a Republican to campaign in New York or D.C.

Let's imagine how things might play out under a national popular vote alternative. When all votes matter, candidates will spread out their attention to states roughly according to their share of the population (not perfectly of course, given travel time and such, but surely pretty close). We can simply divide up the 399 events by each state's share of the national population.

By this estimate, the smallest five states — Wyoming, D.C., Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska — would have gotten one event apiece in 2016. In reality, they got none. Meanwhile, medium-sized states like Oklahoma, Oregon, and Kentucky would have gotten five, five, and six events respectively. In reality, they got none. New York, Texas, and California would have gotten 25, 33, and 48. In reality, as we have seen, only the latter two got even one event.

It is simply beyond question that the Electoral College does not lead presidential candidates to cater to the interests of small states, or big states. On the contrary, only states that randomly happen to have a close partisan balance get attention. It's just a profoundly stupid way to select who gets to hold the most powerful office in the world.

Small state partisans might complain that one event is still not very many for a whole state, when California might get 48. But why should small states get disproportionate weight over national politics (especially given that they already have it in the Senate)? State authorities also rightly maintain power over the many concerns that have been left by the Constitution to that level of government — stuff like most crime and education policy, for example. It is fine for the Wyoming government to decide how they want to run those policy topics in Wyoming itself, but simply unfair to give them a disproportionate say over how the entire country is run.

Others complain that candidates might spend most of their time in cities, ignoring rural voters. Again, this is already true of the current system — candidates don't campaign at all in most rural states and tend to prefer cities even when they do. But at bottom, rural voters will get the same say as everyone else, commensurate with their roughly 20 percent share of the population. In a democracy, votes should count equally.

It's not hard to discern what is going on here. Conservatives currently perceive that the Electoral College provides them with a partisan advantage, and so they are reverse-engineering arguments to support it. They typically boil down to this sort of maudlin appeal to an idyllic image of family farms and small towns. But they just don't hold up under any scrutiny.

And if a Democrat ever wins the presidency while losing the popular vote, it's a safe bet that the Electoral College will be gone in about five minutes.

House Democrats are plainly scared of impeachment. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told TheNew York Times last weekend that she worried Democrats would get bogged down in an impeachment proceeding, and the only way to get President Trump out was to nominate a bland moderate in 2020.

She slightly changed her tune Wednesday, saying that Trump keeps "making the case" for impeachment" and that "he's becoming self-impeachable." It's unclear what "self-impeachment" could entail, but as yet Democrats have not taken any concrete steps on the matter.

So let's lay out carefully the substantive and political case for convening an impeachment inquiry committee.

The Constitution plainly forbids the president profiteering off his office. Article II, Section 1 states that during a presidential term, "he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them."

Trump has also accepted huge payments from foreign governments. Reuters reports that at least seven foreign governments rented luxury condos in Trump's New York hotel — without receiving congressional approval. This also plainly violates the Constitution: Article I, Section 9 states that no one holding an "Office of Profit or Trust" in the U.S. can "accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State" without Congress' consent.

Trump also plainly attempted to obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation — only failing because his subordinates largely failed to carry out his orders. He is arguably obstructing justice again right now, by ordering his associates to disobey congressional subpoenas (indeed, refusing subpoenas was one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon), refusing a clearly legal demand for the House to see his tax returns, and claiming executive privilege over the entire unredacted Mueller report.

Now, according to United States vs. Nixon, there is such a thing as executive privilege (particularly to "protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets"), but it absolutely beggars belief that it would apply in this case given that Trump himself has written that the report shows "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION."

Oh, and let's not forget that, while in office, Trump personally repaid his former lawyer Michael Cohen for bribing a porn star to keep quiet about an affair she had with Trump. And even all that is still leaving quite a lot out! As Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Nixon, Trump is "so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning." No president has ever so obviously deserved impeachment.

This brings me to the politics. For starters, an impeachment inquiry is a valuable process: a committee holds hearings, brings in witnesses, gathers evidence, and constructs a case. National media will surely give it close attention, especially if the committee has national stars who can ask sharp questions and create some drama. Finally, if and when the committee draws up articles of impeachment, this creates a handy document full of evidence and references to prove the case. And in terms of investigating Trump's sprawling corruption, an impeachment inquiry is a handy way to keep it all together and organized. Nothing is outside its scope.

It's true that the Senate is virtually guaranteed to not vote to convict (which requires a two-thirds majority). This is what happened to Bill Clinton — which is probably a lot of why top Democrats are so hesitant to try. When Clinton was impeached, his popularity shot up, and he escaped conviction. But this was almost certainly because of the accurate perception that Republicans were trying to get rid of him on a ginned-up pretext (though the Lewinsky scandal was a genuine abuse of power, to be sure).

Nixon, on the other hand, unquestionably deserved to be impeached, and his popularity plummeted as the Watergate investigation proceeded, falling from over 60 percent to 24 percent over about a year and a half. Conversely, the percentage of Americans thinking he should be removed from office steadily increased, going from 19 percent to 57 percent over that same period.

Now, this isn't the 1970s either. Americans are much more polarized today, and Trump's base of perhaps 40 percent or so will likely never abandon him. But impeachment proceedings can still serve as a powerful political weapon. If Democrats can focus attention on the top two or three stories that are simplest and most scandalous, and repeat them over and over during the proceedings, that helps create a narrative that can stick in the minds of voters. This will both excite the Democratic base and demoralize Republicans, who will struggle to overcome the cognitive dissonance of President "Drain the Swamp" having both hands deep in the federal till. (Meanwhile, presidential candidates can continue to focus mainly on attractive policy to win votes.)

It will also show the country that Democrats are willing to stand up to defend American democracy even if the entire Republican Party will let Trump get away with anything. It shows spirit, determination, and confidence — things that attract voters in times of uncertainty.

Finally, it's worth remembering that impeachment is constitutionally obligated. The separation of powers only works if the other branches actually defend their prerogatives. Every one of the Founding Fathers would be horrified that this corrupt, incompetent oaf is still in office. Retreating into learned helplessness and hoping the voters will rescue the country from Trump will only embolden his assault on American democracy.

Bernie Sanders, perhaps pressed by Elizabeth Warren's flood of ambitious policy proposals, has a new idea: Let prisoners vote! This is an unpopular position — some 75 percent of Americans disagree, probably reflecting the fact that the idea has not come up much in debate. To the ordinary person, prisoner disenfranchisement sounds normal and fine.

It isn't. And Sanders is absolutely right — prisoners, like all Americans, should have an inalienable right to vote.

The case for the policy is straightforward: In a democracy, power and legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, and prisoners are still subject to American government. Indeed, they are vastly more subject to direct state power than the average citizen. They ought to have a say in how that power is wielded even if they have committed a crime. Prisoners do not lose their constitutional rights — on the contrary, the Eighth Amendment protects them from excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment.

In a true democracy, voting is really neither a right nor a privilege — it is a duty. The system only works because people feel they have a moral obligation to participate. Frankly, voting is kind of a chore, especially in the U.S., with our dysfunctional voting systems. And when one considers the fact that one single vote has virtually no chance of swinging any election, individuals have plenty of reason to stay home.

An ironclad right to vote extending to everyone also protects the franchise more broadly, which is a live concern.

Republicans have been pushing a straight-up anti-democratic agenda, trying to rig the electoral systems to give themselves an advantage. Republicans in Florida are gutting a duly-passed ballot initiative restoring voting rights to ex-cons who have served their time by requiring all ex-felons to also pay all fees and fines associated with their conviction before they can vote. Half a million Floridians could lose their voting rights. In Tennessee, the Republican state government attacked voter registration operations with a new law imposing fines of up to $10,000 on groups that turn in unfinished registration forms — "even though they’re required by state law to hand in any registration forms they collect." Texas is considering a bill to make it a felony to provide inaccurate information on a registration form, or vote when one is ineligible, even in cases of honest mistakes.

Democrats should push for an inalienable right to vote rather than playing along with the Republican game of parsing exactly who does and does not deserve suffrage. That just plays into Republican efforts to disenfranchise the Democratic base.

There is nothing to worry about on consequentialist grounds either. Vermont, Maine, and Puerto Rico all allow prison voting. There are 26 European countries that allow at least some prisoners to vote, and 18 of those do regardless of offense. None of those places are some Mad Max hellscape. Even if prisoners were to get behind some ridiculous "make murder legal" agenda, they are only a small fraction of the overall population — even in the U.S., where we have vastly more prisoners than any peer nation.

That huge prison population gets to the strongest argument for prison voting. The gigantic expansion of the prison population starting in the late 1960s was partly a response to a big spike in violent crime. But as Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, it was also a backlash to the civil rights movement — a way to partially roll back the expansion of black civil rights. As of 2016, 26 percent of the black population was disenfranchised in Kentucky, 22 percent in Virginia, 21 percent in Florida, 21 percent in Tennessee, 17 percent in Wyoming, 16 percent in Mississippi, 15 percent in Alabama — and those are just the worst states. A maximalist voting rights agenda — restoring the franchise to ex-cons and prisoners alike — is, even more importantly than partisan political implications, a way to start pushing the civil rights ball forward again.

What's more, it's a way to start reorienting the American justice system away from vindictive punishment and warehousing of all social disorder, and towards rehabilitation and restitution — away from "an eye for an eye" and towards actually reducing crime. The vast majority of criminals will get out of prison someday; allowing them to vote is a powerful symbol that they are still part of American society. It could be the first step in returning education, libraries, and real paid work (as opposed to slavery) to prisons; managing them more humanely to reduce violence and exploitation; and drastically reducing the harshness of sentencing — while simultaneously creating a small constituency for such urgently-needed reforms.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." Bernie Sanders should be commended for standing up on behalf of one of the most despised and maltreated people in American society.

Hillary Clinton's email scandal was the single most-covered story of the entire campaign in 2016. Trump was key in this process: As the story went on, he would seize on any new development and blast it as part of his Crooked Hillary narrative. The press would then write stories about Trump's statements and tweets. Rinse and repeat.

The outlines of a similar process are already taking shape for Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden over a scandal involving Ukraine. It's EMAILS all over again.

Just as with Clinton, there is some genuine sleaze in the Biden story. As The New York Times reports, it goes back to 2016, when Biden was point man in the Obama administration's effort to tamp down on corruption in Eastern Europe. He threatened to stop $1 billion in loan guarantees if the Ukrainian government didn't sack their top prosecutor, who was widely viewed as corrupt. The guy was duly fired, and the guarantees went through.

But Biden himself had a conflict of interest due to his son Hunter, who "at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general." (The company is called Burisma Holdings.)

Now, by all accounts this prosecutor was genuinely corrupt, and there is no sign that Biden's son influenced his decision. But it beggars belief to think that Hunter wasn't being paid for his connections. Nobody spends up to $50,000 per month on a guy with no special experience who had just washed out of the Navy Reserve over a positive cocaine test. Biden apparently had no problem allowing his son to trade on his name like that, or his son creating the impression that Biden might have a corrupt motivation.

But the way the Times reported this story is instructive. They put the juicy Biden details at the top, and buried by far the most important piece of news: that the president's personal lawyer is working with the Ukrainian government on the Biden story. "Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year." He discussed this with Trump, who then suggested Attorney General Barr should open an investigation. The idea is to both smear Biden and cast doubt on the Mueller investigation as somehow coming from a Democratic conspiracy with Ukrainians.

Top law enforcement authorities potentially conspiring with the president to conduct politically motivated prosecutions is hugely more important than anything Hunter Biden did. It's awesomely corrupt — basically straight out of the aspiring dictator's handbook. But the Times buried it way at the bottom of their article.

It's easy to see where this is probably going to go. Ukrainian authorities, hoping for favorable treatment from the U.S., will open an official investigation of Biden and his son, and maybe even charge them with something or other. The corrupt attack dog Barr will investigate as well, dragging it out to maximize the damage. Trump will seize on the story, repeat "BIDEN SAVED HIS COKEHEAD SON FROM PROSECUTION" ten billion times, and the mainstream media will duly amplify his message. A Media Matters investigation of major media Twitter feeds found that they did not rebut Trump's disinformation 65 percent of the time. They "amplified Trump's misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day."

Incidentally, Trump's media strategy is a good lesson in messaging for the Democrats, who will need to beat him at his own game. Trump's various crimes and corrupt acts are so numerous and complicated that it will surely take future historians whole books to describe them in detail; you can't possibly expect the public to take on the whole picture during a campaign. As Trump shows, simple messaging and constant repetition are the way to break through. As Republican strategist Frank Luntz once said, "[T]here's a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time." So just pick two or three simple stories, slap a clear, zippy slogan on each one, and repeat them over and over and over.

At any rate, it would be nice if the big-shot political press would do their jobs responsibly, and not enable Trump's subversion of democracy. But I wouldn't remotely expect it. Trump gets the views and clicks. Democrats in Congress are going to have to use their own power to stop or slow Trump's corruption and push their own media campaign.

As for the party rank and file, it might be worth considering not nominating someone who has 50 years of baggage.

It's clear that Attorney General William Barr has been an utter stooge for President Trump — just as dishonest as Rudy Giuliani, but far more effective. In his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, he spun, dissembled, concocted ridiculous hairsplitting arguments, and as Nancy Pelosi said Thursday, lied outright to Congress.

His performance has elicited a lot of stunned commentary from centrist journalists and politicians, who thought that Barr was one of the storied "honorable" Republicans. Moderate Sens. Doug Jones (D-Al.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) now say they regret voting to confirm him.

But Barr's defense of Trump comports perfectly with his previous career. Cover-ups are just what he does best — and he's probably just getting started.

At the hearing, Barr continually insisted that his wildly deceptive four-page summary of the Mueller investigation was in fact totally fair and balanced — despite the fact that, as we recently learned, Mueller himself sent a letter to Barr angrily complaining about the summary the very next day. It "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office's work and conclusions," Mueller wrote. "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation," which "threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations."

Indeed, it turns out that Mueller and his staff had already prepared a summary as well, but Barr didn't release it until the full redacted report came out — obviously because he wanted to spin the coverage to protect Trump.

This is also reportedly the crux of Pelosi's allegation that Barr lied to Congress. He told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) at a previous hearing that he didn't know why Mueller's staff had objected to the summary, when in fact he had already received the letter.

But as Mother Jones' Pema Levy outlines, this is just par for the course over Barr's whole career. When he was attorney general for George H.W. Bush, he advised the president in the final days of his administration to pardon six people who were neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration had illegally funneled money to right-wing Contra death squads in Nicaragua by secretly selling arms to Iran, and Bush himself was widely expected to be implicated in the upcoming trial of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who was pardoned and thus never went on trial). The whole investigation was effectively stymied. Prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh said at the time: "the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."

And as Jamelle Bouie detailed in The New York Times, while an assistant attorney general in 1989, Barr wrote a secret legal opinion justifying the straight-up kidnapping of foreign criminal suspects, without asking their governments' permission. The U.S. military duly took Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega into custody, after a fruitcake operation involving blasting rock music day and night at the church where he had sought sanctuary. When Congress got wind of the memo, they demanded to see it, but he gave them a 13-page summary of the memo instead. Lo and behold, when Congress finally got its hands on the whole memo years later, Barr's summary turned out to be a complete crock. It "omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion," as Ryan Goodman summarized on the Just Security blog. Imagine that!

But in future, probably the most telling portion of Barr's Senate appearance came when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) nailed him on whether Trump had ever asked him to investigate someone. Barr stammered and squirmed, and evaded a direct answer, because of course Trump has done that. He demanded the FBI investigate Hillary Clinton dozens of times, and The New York Timesreports that Trump has encouraged Barr to open an investigation into possible Democratic connections with Ukrainian oligarchs — including Joe Biden's son Hunter.

The objective, obviously, is to smear Trump's political opponents with ginned-up lawsuits. As Brian Beutler writes, "If that turns into a dead end, he will find something else." All this is extraordinarily dangerous — it's practically Authoritarianism 101. And if Democrats want it to stop, they need to fight back hard.

Many Democrats and liberals are fixated on one question regarding the 2020 primary: Who can beat Donald Trump? Dave Weigel reports that even some Democratic women are leaning towards Joe Biden because the 2016 election apparently proved a female candidate can't win. "[T]he likelihood of defeating Donald Trump is to me overwhelmingly the most important factor in choosing a candidate - factors one through three, really one through 300. The key is just figuring out who that person is," writes Josh Marshall.

But this is an impossible task, and therefore a bad thing to prioritize. Rather than trying to guess who might appeal to people who are not loyal Democrats, better to simply pick a candidate you actually like.

The election of Donald Trump ought to have put paid to the idea that anybody knows anything about who can win. The man was a reality TV show host, credibly accused of multiple instances of sexual assault, patently corrupt to his back teeth, and had no political experience whatsoever. Surely this guy can't win, right? For the whole campaign, political commentators were openly contemptuous of the idea that he could win either the primary or the general election. All the election data shops predicted that Clinton would win easily. But nope!

The political details of any country are far too complicated and uncertain to be able to predict with any kind of consistent confidence. You've got to consider whether a candidate will be able to organize an effective national campaign, how he or she will perform in speeches and debates, whether some hidden dirty laundry might come up, what might happen to the economy, whether there will be some disaster and how that might play, and about 50 other factors.

To be sure, sometimes it is possible, like the second round of the recent French presidential election where Emmanuel Macron had a consistent 30-point polling lead and went on to crush the far-right Marine Le Pen. But that kind of gigantic difference is fairly rare — in the first round of the French election, a swap of just 1 percentage point could have meant Macron facing Jean-Luc Mélenchon or François Fillon, which would have turned out very differently.

This holds doubly true for the United States, due to our unnecessarily complex constitutional structure. Victory in a presidential election depends not on overall votes, but who wins a tiny handful of swing states. Polls are usually pretty accurate across the whole country, but as we saw in 2016, they can be badly wrong in individual states.

Furthermore, any candidate might draw a third-party challenger that is strong enough to split the lefty vote and throw the election to Trump — and that's as true for centrists as it is for leftists. Howard Schultz has threatened to run a third party campaign if the party nominates Bernie Sanders, but the Green Party's Jill Stein won more votes than Hillary Clinton's margin of defeat in the key states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson did the same in those two states, plus Pennsylvania.

There's no sense in fussing too much about either Greens, libertarians, or greedy centrists refusing to vote tactically. In a democracy, people have choice, and the whole system depends on people voting out of a sense of moral duty. The most logical thing to do tactically speaking is not vote at all, since the chance of your vote swinging the election is virtually nil. In a parliamentary system, people could simply vote their conscience and assemble a coalition afterwards, but potential splitters is simply an unavoidable aspect of the crummy U.S. Constitution.

As Alex Pareene argues, "electability" is always invoked as a reason why the Democratic Party can't have nice things — why liberals must vote for the worse candidate, because the alternative is Republicans winning. It's left the party in a defensive crouch, terrified of its own shadow, convinced that America can't have anything but occasional bursts of penny-ante reforms.

I knew people personally who shared Bernie Sanders' politics but thought voting for him in the 2016 primary was too risky. And while one can't say for sure he would have been able to defeat Trump, he certainly couldn't have done any worse. Those voters may as well have gambled on someone whose record actually matched their values.

The reality is that we can't know who would be the strongest challenger to Trump. The only thing we can say is that Trump is consistently unpopular, especially given how strong the economy is, and he trailsmostDemocrats in polls. Actual Republican policy, meanwhile, is even less popular than Trump. Almost nobody wants the tax cuts and deregulation the GOP is stuffing down the country's throat.

Trump has a dedicated base, but he is almost certainly beatable. Voter enthusiasm and dedicated support will surely help — as the GOP itself shows, a fanatically dedicated minority can punch far above their political weight. The best option for Democratic primary voters is to research the candidates' positions and records, and pick the one they think is best.

Being timid and going with the "safe" choice backfired horribly in 2016. It's time to go for broke.

On Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, a recurring gag has the host getting misty-eyed over former President Obama. Back in 2017 Colbert showed footage of Obama discussing the Republican health care bill, and responded by saying "I miss you" directly into the camera. In April this year, after talking about President Trump's child separation policy, he joked that Obama had also "confiscated" children's "hugs."

The jokes work because they speak to a deep well of nostalgia for the former leader among the Democratic electorate. He was the avatar of the party for eight years, and the first black president — not to mention intelligent, suave, elegant, and handsome. Especially comparing him to Trump, it's not hard to see where this attitude comes from.

But it's long since time for liberals to reckon with the fact that Obama was simply not a very good president. He failed to grasp the reality of his political situation, and often used his power in morally abominable ways. If the Democrats want to put the forces of Trumpism away for good, they will have to do better than returning to the pre-2016 status quo.

Let's review some history. In 2008, the Democrats were riding high. They won the presidency and sweeping majorities in both houses of Congress — including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for a brief period. After the grotesque horror of the Bush presidency and the ongoing financial crisis and recession, it really seemed like the country had turned a corner. Obama was going to put things right.

And he did do some things right. He did pass a big stimulus package in early 2009, and got through halfway decent reforms of health care and financial regulation. But from the beginning, Obama's agenda was severely compromised with his (and his party's) fixation on bipartisanship.

From the very beginning of 2009, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell filibustered almost every piece of legislation he could, grinding the wheels of government nearly to a halt. It was patently obvious that Republicans would do everything in their power to stymie Obama's agenda. Yet the administration designed the stimulus with about one-third tax cuts, hoping to attract Republican votes. (They ultimately got zero in the House and only three in the Senate.) And Senate Democrats wasted months making concessions to the likes of Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to get bipartisan support for ObamaCare, but every last Republican senator voted against it anyway.

To be fair, that Republican obstruction did limit what Obama could do in some arenas. But he had a free hand in his response to the housing crisis, and his administration used its power to make it worse. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner deliberately designed a homeowner assistance program (using money already authorized as part of the bailout) to help banks on the sly. The point, as Geithner told Elizabeth Warren, was to "foam the runway" for the banks, so they didn't absorb foreclosures too fast.

When it turned out banks had lost most of the mortgage paperwork during the go-go bubble years, and were foreclosing on millions of people with systematically forged documents — plus committing literally hundreds of other crimes, including money laundering for drug cartels and terrorists — the Obama Department of Justice let them off the hook with wrist-slap fines. (He also refused to prosecute any Bush-era officials for illegal torture or other war crimes.)

And contrary to Colbert's whitewashing joke, Obama's immigration policy was quite bad, especially in his first term. Again trying to appease Republican xenophobes, he scaled up border enforcement and deported more unauthorized immigrants than any president in history up to that time. Liberals have sometimes mixed up pictures of Obama-era immigrant detention centers with those of Trump (who has still been far worse on immigration, to be clear).

As major Democratic donor and former FCC chairman Reed Hundt writes in A Crisis Wasted, in 2008 it was clear the country required a drastic, fundamental overhaul to repair the damage done by four decades of neoliberal devastation. But Obama instead attempted to restore the pre-crisis status quo, saving the banks from their own misdeeds while letting homeowners drown, and going for moderate, incremental reforms when he did anything at all. The result was a catastrophic collapse of the party's fortunes, losing over 1,030 federal and state seats, control of both the Senate and the House, and finally the presidency as well.

Much of that ground has been recovered due to Trump backlash, but Democrats will have to do better if they actually win power in 2020. The country still needs a top-to-bottom economic overhaul, plus a huge decarbonization program to wrench down greenhouse gas emissions, plus reversals of the horrible damage Trump has done to government and society. Simply returning to the pre-2017 status quo is not going to cut it.

In the United States today, nationalist politics usually goes hand-in-hand with a contempt for the environment and climate change denial. Worrying about the climate is seen as girly hippie stuff, while sucking in carcinogenic diesel smoke is manly and tough. But that has not always been the case — witness Teddy Roosevelt, a dedicated imperialist who greatly enjoyed natural beauty and national parks.

As climate change becomes more and more undeniable, it's likely that the American right will pivot from climate denialism to climate nationalism — a sort of Fortress America approach. This perspective can be seen in a recent Thomas Friedman column, who argued for building a "high wall" because "in an era when more and more countries will fracture under environmental, population, criminal and technological stresses, we simply cannot take everyone who shows up at our border."

But this is a terrible approach to climate policy, especially in the United States. As an inherently international problem, climate change can't be solved by selfishness and belligerence.

The United States is the major culprit in terms of historical greenhouse gas emissions, but the plain fact is that China is by far the largest emitter today — with India coming up quickly as well. The major objectives for world climate policy are thus threefold: reduce emissions in the industrialized world, reduce China's emissions, and help India and other poorer countries industrialize in a green fashion (if India, which will soon be the most populous country on the planet, follows China down the path of coal and oil, we are hosed).

That means a lot of very generous diplomacy and trade policy. America needs not just a Green New Deal to decarbonize our own economy, but to develop workable green processes for the rest of the world too. Because we (and Europe) have tons of wealth, it makes sense for the U.S. to fund a crash research program in sustainable manufacturing, smelting, and concrete production, so as to get the rest of the world to take them up as quickly as possible. It would be following in the footsteps of Germany, which helped make solar panels cheap by subsidizing them when they were expensive.

This would surely require lots of loans and grants to help poorer nations leapfrog fossil fuels. Coal and oil are cheap, tempting, and widely available power sources; we want the choice to forego them to be as easy as possible — and it's the right thing to do in any case.

Now, as I have argued before, in certain contexts climate nationalism isn't completely senseless. China, despite being governed by so-called communists, is basically an authoritarian, conservative society. The current Indian government is far-right as well. Both those countries are taking sizable action on climate change, because it makes sense in terms of their own self-interest. (Only American Republicans are loopy enough to deny it's even happening.)

But America does not have the same luxury. When it comes to climate change, rich nations must concern themselves with the welfare of poorer nations. Whereas the best thing for China and India is to get their own affairs in order, the best thing for the U.S. is to help them do that same thing. Either one could blow up the global climate by itself — something which can and should be the basis of climate negotiations and agreements.

One could imagine a future in which America approaches China and India generously, but then cynically keeps out refugees at home. (Friedman proposes something like this.) But this is unlikely. Any progressive government that supports climate diplomacy will surely support at least returning refugee acceptance levels to the Obama years, plus generous foreign funding to stem the crises driving refugee flows in the first place. Any right-wing government — which always will be much more rooted in emotions and aesthetics than logic — will likely respond with irrational belligerence, as Eric Levitz argues. Witness Trump cutting off aid to Central American countries suffering climate-fueled refugee crises, or proposals to attack China and India to slow their emissions:

I did: bombing China’s and India’s coal facilities. It would be far more effective and realistic than anything you’ve proposed thus far. So get on board, climate denier. I guess I’m the boss now. https://t.co/FpoKIPL5lE

But here we are: the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are two elderly white men — Biden and Bernie Sanders (at least in terms of polls at this early date). Nevertheless, their political legacies are poles apart. Biden represents the old party orthodoxy, while Sanders represents a new ideological force trying to displace it. Their records make for a good illustration of the political stakes in this primary.

Let's examine three major policy areas.

Political economy

Certainly the biggest difference between Sanders and Biden is in their economic views. Sanders has been a die-hard advocate of unions, taxing the rich, regulating corporate abuses (especially in finance), fair trade, and social insurance for his entire career. It's what he cares about most, and where his messaging is most consistent. (In an amusing interview on the Today Show from 1981, Sanders said: "In our society, theoretically a democratic society, you have a handful of people who control our economy. You have maybe 2 percent of the population who owns one third of the entire wealth of America, 80 percent of the stocks, 90 percent of the bonds.") As Mayor of Burlington, he worked to preserve public housing, enable worker and consumer cooperatives, and ensure public ownership and control of the city waterfront.

Biden, by contrast, has been a bag man for big corporations for his entire career. Delaware is like the Luxembourg of U.S. states — a tiny tax haven and flag of convenience for corporations who own the local political system outright, and Biden is no exception. His economic policy career has been one disgrace after the next — sponsoring or voting for multiple rounds of financial deregulation, trade deals that savaged the American manufacturing base, and bankruptcy "reform" that made it much harder to discharge consumer debt (and nearly impossible to get rid of student debt). It's no surprise at all that on the same day he launched his campaign, Biden held a fundraiser including several corporate lobbyists and Republican donors at the home of a Comcast executive.

Civil rights

Though it's not his prime area of concern, Sanders has a real record of civil rights activism. As a student at the University of Chicago, he was a bit player in the 1960s civil rights movement, helping organize protests against segregation and racist abuses, and was even fined for resisting arrest at a sit-in. As a representative and senator, he has a very good voting record on civil rights legislation.

Biden, by contrast, openly courted white backlash to the civil rights movement to keep himself in office in the 1970s, working with southern segregationists like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland to stop school integration. "I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975. Biden was also key in helping Clarence Thomas get onto the Supreme Court, harshly questioning Anita Hill, who had accused Thomas of sexually harassing her, and did not call witnesses who could have supported Hill to testify, one of which also accused Thomas of harassment. Since that time he has supported many civil rights bills, but he was also one of the driving forces behind racist mass incarceration (see below).

Mass incarceration

Here Sanders' record is not quite as good. He was clearly somewhat caught up in the crime panic of the 1980s and 1990s. He voted for the infamous 1994 crime bill, saying in a speech: "It is my firm belief that clearly there are people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them." More recently, he voted for the terrible SESTA/FOSTA bill, which has endangered sex workers across the country.

Still, Sanders has also attacked the wildly over-punitive criminal system. He says he voted for the 1994 bill not because he agreed with it entirely, but because it contained money to combat violence against women and a 10-year assault weapons ban. In the same speech noted above, he said "How do we talk about the very serious crime problem in America without mentioning that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world, by far, with 22 percent of our children in poverty, and 5 million children hungry today? Do you think maybe that might have something to do with crime? … We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails."

Sanders also voted against the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, against banning Pell grants for prisoners, and against the 1991 crime bill. In a speech about the latter bill, he responded to other politicians who were arguing that America wasn't tough enough on criminals by noting that the U.S. already had locked up more of its population than any other country. "[W]e have the highest percentage of people in America in jail per capita of any industrialized nation on Earth. We've beaten South Africa. We've beaten the Soviet Union. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars?" (He now says he regrets his 1994 vote, and wants to allow ex-cons and prisoners to vote.)

Biden, by contrast, was a war on crime die-hard. Where Sanders grudgingly voted for the 1994 crime bill, Biden actually wrote the thing, and pushed hard for its passage. As Jamelle Bouie details, he again teamed up with Strom Thrumond to write and pass the Comprehensive Control Act of 1984, which expanded civil asset forfeiture (where the police can take your property without charging you with a crime). He sponsored the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which among other things created the hugely racist sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, the similar drug war bill of 1988, and the 2003 RAVE Act. As Bouie writes, "Joe Biden, in other words, is the Democratic face of the drug war."

To sum up: For many of the worst problems bedeviling American society today — corporate corruption, extreme inequality, wild over-imprisonment, financial oligarchy — Biden either enabled or directly helped create them. While this was happening (with some exceptions), Sanders was out on the political fringe, yelling that Biden and company were leading the country into ruin. Biden's opening video only plays into this point, portraying Trump as some bizarre aberration and promising to return to the supposedly-idyllic pre-2016 status quo.

For Democratic voters, the choice — at least between these two candidates — seems clear.

President Trump is not going to allow Democrats to conduct any oversight of his administration if he can help it. He's ordering his people to disobey subpoenas, trying to stop his tax returns from being released, and preemptively suing the House to keep Democrats out of his financial records.

Democrats can turn to the courts, of course. But it's probable that the conservative Supreme Court majority will eventually rubber-stamp whatever crackpot theory Trump's lawyers can dream up to keep his corruption out of public view. Indeed, they are already laying the groundwork to help Trump rig the 2020 census. ("If the president does it, that means it is not illegal." — 2020 Justice Kavanaugh opinion, probably.)

As Michael Sweeney suggests, this raises a question: Should Democrats start pushing the envelope on tactics? If Trump won't obey the law, perhaps Democrats can force him to do so by taking the debt ceiling, government operations, or military funding hostage.

The argument in favor is straightforward. Trump is unquestionably the most corrupt president in American history, and almost certainly committed obstruction of justice during the Mueller investigation. It is vitally important as a matter of constitutional responsibilities and democratic values that the details of his corrupt administration and business empire are exposed — at the very least. If the administration won't obey the law, and the right-wing hacks in the judiciary won't force him to do it, then maximalist tactics to protect the foundation of American democracy are justified.

Of course Republicans will cry hypocrisy, and centrists will wring their handkerchiefs into shreds, but there is a key difference. Whereas Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage and shut down the government to try to achieve policy goals they couldn't get through the normal legislative process, Democrats would be doing it to force Trump to obey the law. The way the Constitution is supposed to work is for the House, Senate, and president to get together and iron out a compromise when they disagree about legislative priorities. Threatening disaster because you want to take away people's health insurance but didn't win enough seats to get it done is illegitimate — but doing so to preserve the constitutional democratic order is not. Abraham Lincoln fought a war that killed 700,000 people to do that in his time.

However, the argument against — at least in the case of the debt ceiling and government funding — is also pretty obvious. It isn't at all clear that Trump or his supporters actually care about the government continuing to operate, or the global financial system continuing to operate. A hostage has to be something the targeted person actually cares about. (Indeed, I would bet a considerable sum Trump doesn't even understand why hitting the debt limit would be a bad idea.)

Trump definitely does care about military funding, but that would be such an easy thing to demagogue it might not be worth it for Democrats — just imagine the screeching hysteria on Fox News. The military is very popular and it might backfire badly.

On the other hand, Trump is also known to fold easily in tough negotiations. He's got the classic bully psychology of enjoying vicious cruelty towards the weak and helpless, but deference towards an opponent with real power. He's shown that again and again as president — from gun control, to trade deals, to the border wall, he consistently blusters and rages, then caves. He's not a fundamentally strong person.

In any case, the chance of Democrats actually trying this sort of procedural maximalism is essentially zero. Attempting this sort of high-risk gamble would take the sort of unswerving determination and lockstep message discipline that Democrats plainly lack. But even if they don't want to risk the debt ceiling or government funding, they really must consider every possible lever at their disposal to force Trump to submit to legal oversight. Issue a blizzard of subpoenas and hold anyone who doesn't show in contempt of Congress immediately. Send congressional staff directly to the IRS to demand Trump's tax returns. Hire private investigators to look into Trump's businesses and past. Refuse to pass any routine business aside from budgetary matters. Comb through the U.S. code to find any obscure powers that might be invoked. Perhaps above all, scream bloody murder in the press. As the right-wing propaganda machine has demonstrated, there is real power in a coordinated media offensive — and Trump is an obsessive cable news addict.

At least do something to prove Democrats can't be pushed around. Failing to do so only invites Trump to ramp up his attacks on American democracy.

Democratic leaders are not keen on impeaching President Trump, even after the Mueller report revealed several outrageous abuses of power. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, "Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point." He's clearly following the lead of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who said back in March that "I’m not for impeachment … [it's] so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country."

This attitude does not bode well. Whether they impeach or not, it will take a snarling political fight to protect American democracy from Trump's corruption. Being timid and hesitant merely invites Trump to continue to trample the Constitution.

Democratic leaders would do well to study the failure to establish a functioning democracy in Russia after the February Revolution in 1917. (It is not a perfect analogy of course, but does provide some broadly applicable lessons.) The primary cause of that revolution was the internal collapse of tsarist autocracy, which was shaky even before the bumbling doofus Nicholas II took power. The rickety regime was unable to handle the apocalyptic violence and chaos of the First World War, lost all legitimacy and control, and eventually gave up power without a fight. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door."

That created an enormous power vacuum. Traditional liberals in the Constitutional Democratic Party (or Kadets), led by Prince Lvov and Pavel Miliukov, formed a Provisional Government to try to fill it. But liberals were a small minority of the population — the vast peasant class and most of the industrial working class supported the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) or Mensheviks, while a smaller portion supported the more radical Bolsheviks. "Soviets" (or councils) had sprung up across the country immediately after the collapse of tsarism, based on the experience of the brief attempted revolution in 1905, and the Provisional Government relied on them to have any sort of legitimacy.

This turned out to be untenable. The Provisional Government had essentially appointed itself, but the Kadets repeatedly put off elections because they feared they would be shunted aside. (This turned out to be true — when the Constituent Assembly was elected later in 1917, the Kadets got only 4.7 percent of the vote, while the Socialist Revolutionaries got 40.7 percent.)

But the democratic socialists refused to force the issue, as they were hypnotized by Marxist ideology about history. The orthodox socialist view in those days was that peasant nations had to first go through a stage of bourgeois democracy, after which they could evolve into socialism. The fact that bourgeois liberals were simply too few to govern couldn't break through the ideological logjam. It was beyond obvious that what Russia needed was a democratic constitution and the rule of law, after which questions of political economy could be sorted out. Yet democratic socialists insisted on deferring to the liberals, even after SR leader Viktor Chernov was nearly lynched by an angry crowd after a worker demanded he "take power, you son of a b****, when it is given to you!"

It's worth noting that Marx himself never would have been so politically daft, as can be seen in his sharp journalism about the collapse of the Second French Republic.

All this — together with Alexander Kerensky's disastrous decision to launch an offensive in July 1917, which destroyed the last of the Provisional Government's legitimacy and wrecked the Russian army — opened a path for Lenin's anti-democratic Bolsheviks, who would seize power by force, and enforce their rule through mass terror.

Now this is not to say that Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats calling for impeachment are analogous to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, they are loyal to democracy and recognize their constitutional obligation to defend it.

The lesson here is that in times of chaos and rising anti-democratic forces, defending democratic institutions requires bold, uncompromising action. One must fight for power anduse it. And this is manifestly the case in America today. The president is plainly a crook. He's constantly using the presidency to enrich himself and his family — a flagrant violation of the Constitution. The Mueller report shows him attempting multiple abuses of power to obstruct the investigation — which only didn't work because his subordinates didn't obey his instructions.

But most of those subordinates are gone. Trump has now installed a corrupt stooge as the nation's top law enforcement officer. As Greg Sargent points out, he's instructing a former subordinate to disobey a House subpoena, suing House Democrats to prevent them from seeing his finances, and his administration is preparing to disobey the legal requirement that the IRS turn over Trump's tax returns. "Plainly, Trump is determined to treat any and all oversight as illegitimate … with the goal of keeping his seemingly bottomless corruption shielded from public view," he writes.

Democratic leaders are clearly uncomfortable with this reality. They just want to wait for an election to remove Trump from office, after which things will hopefully go back to normal. "Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months, and the American people will make a judgment," says Hoyer. As Alex Pareene writes, the "congressional opposition is led by people, like Hoyer, terrified to exercise their own power."

But Trump could very possibly win. And even if he does lose, he might well refuse to leave office, given how it would expose him to potential criminal prosecution. Whether they like it or not, defending American democracy is going to take every tool at Democrats' disposal, and the tenacity of a wolverine. The Democrats simply standing back and hoping the people will stop Trump for them is the best way to help him corrupt the United States into a Turkey-style authoritarian pseudo-democracy.

Luckily, Pelosi is softening her line on impeachment, pushed by dissent from younger leftists within the party. Now she's saying that "if that’s the place the facts take us, that’s the place we have to go." Of course that's the entire point of an impeachment inquiry — first you hold hearings and gather evidence, and then if justified, you draw up articles of impeachment.

Still, it's an encouraging sign — but it remains to be seen whether the Democratic leadership can do what Chernov and company could not, namely find the spine and energy to rise to the occasion.

Before the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report, Attorney General William Barr held a press conference where he tried to frame the initial media narrative. Barr repeatedly emphasized that Mueller did not establish direct coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia (even repeating the president's favorite talking point, "no collusion"), stated that Trump cooperated fully with the investigation, and expressed his sympathy for the president. At least for a minute, it worked great. Wolf Blitzer, for one, did the typical CNN thing of blithely repeating what the powerful man in a suit said.

But after seeing the whole redacted report, it is beyond obvious that Barr was conducting PR spin. As attorney general, Barr is serving as a dishonest propagandist to protect a corrupt president.

Let's just examine one aspect of the story: whether or not Trump interfered with the Mueller investigation. In his press conference, Barr said:

[T]he White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel's investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. And at the same time, the president took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation. [Barr]

This statement about documents and aides is grotesquely misleading. Mueller details multiple instances in which he demanded subordinates interfere with the investigation or stop it entirely, or tried to do it himself. When the Special Counsel was appointed, Trump flew into a rage, and demanded to know why then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the investigation. "How could you let this happen, Jeff?" he said. "Sessions recalled that the President said to him, 'you were supposed to protect me,' or words to that effect," writes Mueller. Trump then said Sessions should resign, though ultimately decided against it for the time being.

Trump then started arguing that Mueller had conflicts of interest, as a pretext to get rid of him, and ordered White House Counsel Don McGahn to carry it out: "McGahn recalled that the president called him at home twice and on both occasions directed him to call Rosenstein and say that Mueller had conflicts that precluded him from serving as special counsel." McGahn refused, and prepared to resign instead, and Trump dropped the matter. (Months later, Trump would attempt to get McGahn to lie about the story: "After the story broke, the president, through his personal counsel and two aides, sought to have McGahn deny that he had been directed to remove the special counsel," though McGahn refused again.)

The words "in fact" in Barr's statement above are bending reality to the breaking point. The only reason Trump's efforts to obstruct the investigation did not work is because his subordinates refused to carry out his instructions. As Mueller writes, "The president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests."

At any rate, Trump eventually stopped asking McGahn to get rid of Mueller. But a couple days later, Trump cooked up different scheme to protect himself: "[T]he president met one-on-one with Corey Lewandowski in the Oval Office and dictated a message to be delivered to Attorney General Sessions that would have had the effect of limiting the Russia investigation to future election interference only," writes Mueller. When Sessions wouldn't take back his recusal, Trump then started publicly attacking him, and tried to get him to resign again.

Later still, Trump restarted his efforts to get Sessions to stop the investigation once again — and turn it on his electoral opponent instead: "From summer 2017 through 2018, the president attempted to have Attorney General Sessions reverse his recusal, take control of the special counsel's investigation, and order an investigation of Hillary Clinton."

Elsewhere, Trump engaged in what looks like a pretty clear example of witness tampering — dangling pardons in front of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort to prevent negative testimony. "When Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the president, the president's personal counsel stated that Flynn's actions would be viewed as reflecting 'hostility' towards the president. During Manafort's prosecution and while the jury was deliberating, the president repeatedly stated that Manafort was being treated unfairly and made it known that Manafort could receive a pardon," writes Mueller.

Something similar happened with Michael Cohen, after he lied to Congress about Trump's pursuit of a real estate project in Moscow in 2016: "After the FBI searched Cohen's home and office in April 2018, the president publicly asserted that Cohen would not 'flip' and privately passed messages of support to him. Cohen also discussed pardons with the president's personal counsel and believed that if he stayed on message, he would get a pardon or the president would do 'something else' to make the investigation end."

In his press conference, Barr pointed to evidence of Trump's "non-corrupt motives" as weighing "heavily against any allegation that the president had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation." This is like saying someone didn't commit attempted murder because their gun jammed when they pulled the trigger. Yeah, except for repeatedly trying to get the investigation stopped or redirected, get the special counsel fired, and stop his felonious subordinates from testifying against him, Trump was a regular Joan of Arc. What a complete joke.

Indeed, it was obvious that Barr would do something like this long beforehand, because he has been doing it for years. He got the attorney general job because of a letter arguing the president basically can't commit obstruction of justice. His previous most high-profile job was working to bury the Iran-Contra investigation.

He's a Trump stooge, and every word that comes out of his mouth should be assumed false until proven otherwise.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. One major force behind this increase is surely President Donald Trump, who has frequently pushed anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, and repeatedly refused to condemn anti-Semites.

Let's review some history, broken into four categories.

1) Israel loyalty

In the recent controversy over Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) criticizing Israel, conservatives accused her of perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes about Jews having "dual loyalty" to Israel. While she never actually said anything like that, as Eli Valley points out, she could have phrased her comments better to avoid causing unnecessary offense (and indeed she has done so since that time).

But Trump has said something far, far worse than even what the most bad-faith critics of Omar accused her of saying. In a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in April, he said that recently reelected Benjamin Netanyahu was "your prime minister." Instead of implying dual loyalty, he all but said Jews aren't actually Americans at all, because they have single loyalty to Israel. As Josh Marshall writes, it's "as though American Jews are somehow an expat community of Israelis resident in the United States." (The conservatives who had a purple-faced screaming fit about Omar mysteriously didn't raise a fuss about this.)

2) Jews and money

One of the oldest stereotypes about Jews is that they are all money-grubbing chislers — a prejudice that was at the root of countless medieval pogroms. Trump has implied or straight-up said this many times. In a 1991 book, John O'Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, said Trump had told him: "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." He later called O'Donnell a "loser" in an interview with Playboy, but allowed that, "The stuff O'Donnell wrote about me is probably true."

In December 2015, Trump gave a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition and said, "I'm a negotiator like you folks, we are negotiators ... Is there anybody that doesn't renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them — perhaps more than any other room I've ever spoken in." He also asserted they wouldn't support him because he couldn't be bought: "You're not going to support me because I don't want your money. Isn't it crazy?"

When asked by Jake Tapper in February 2016 to denounce former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, Trump refused, saying "I just don't know anything about him." (Though he did grudgingly disavow his endorsement at other times.)

After the extreme right-wing rally at Charlottesville in August 2017, where torch-wielding mobs chanted "Jews will not replace us," and one neo-Nazi terrorist drove his car into a crowd, injuring 19 people and killing one, Trump at first condemned the extreme right. But the next day he walked back his own statement, insisting that the violence was also the fault of the "alt-left," and defended the rally attendees, saying there were "some very fine people on both sides."

On at leastthree other occasions, Trump retweeted explicitly white nationalist Twitter accounts that had posted a slew of racist and anti-Semitic content.

4) Conspiracy theories

Probably the worst anti-Semitic propaganda Trump has pushed is the classic conspiracy theory that Jews control world politics and the global economy. In the last days of the 2016 campaign, he rolled out an ad featuring three rich Jews — then-Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and financier George Soros — over a narration decrying "those who control the levers of power in Washington," and the "global special interests" who "partner with these people who don't have your good in mind." The obvious implication is that Hillary Clinton is a cat's paw for a global Jewish conspiracy. As Josh Marshall writes, "These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary."

Trump has focused particular ire on George Soros in this vein. He baselessly accused him of funding protesters of Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and suggested Soros could be funding the refugee caravan — lending credence to the conspiracy theory that world Jewry is conspiring to bring immigrants into the United States to replace white people (thus the "Jews will not replace us" chant referenced above).

It bears repeating that this kind of thing is very close to what you find in Mein Kampf. But you don't have to look at history to see the danger of spreading this sort of poison. A Trump supporter sent a pipe bomb to Soros' house (as well as 15 other high-profile liberals) last year. The right-wing terrorist who massacred 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October espoused the exact same conspiracy theory about refugees. This is simply the kind of thing that happens when the most powerful person in the world is constantly spewing anti-Semitic propaganda.

But Trump isn't going to stop. As to the attempted bombing, he mainly complained that it interrupted his campaign narrative. "Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this 'Bomb' stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows," he tweeted.

Indulging Trump out of a perception that he is pro-Israel, or is delivering the tax cuts American oligarchs crave (as GOP elites like Sheldon Adelson have done), is extraordinarily dangerous for Jews across the world — and indeed minorities of any kind, especially Muslims. If we want to stamp out racist hate in this country, the obvious first step is to remove Trump from office, either by impeachment or the ballot box.

After some delays, Bernie Sanders has released 10 years of tax returns. It turns out he is pretty rich. He took in $561,293 in adjusted gross income in 2018 — but over a million dollars in both 2017 and 2016, when he had a ton of book revenue coming in. That makes him the third-highest earning Democratic candidate this year, behind Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.

Indeed, Sanders is officially in the top 1 percent of income, and this has some wondering if it somehow jams up his political narrative. His "higher income in recent years has created some political awkwardness for the senator, who in his 2016 presidential campaign frequently railed against 'millionaires and billionaires' and their influence over the political process," writes Thomas Kaplan in TheNew York Times.

This is nonsense. The only reason to worry about a candidate's income is insofar as it suggests they are either vulnerable to corruption, or have been corrupted. Sanders has made a lot of money, but he is certainly not on the take — and he will not hesitate to raise his own taxes if he gets a chance.

The obvious truth as to why Sanders is rich is that he is very famous, and it is extremely easy to capitalize on fame. All he had to do was write a book — or even easier, pay someone else to do it, though reportedly Sanders did not use a ghostwriter. He probably could have gotten a lot more if he had been strategic about it. Just look how Kim Kardashian makes more money than her husband Kanye West.

What matters here is the method by which politicians and ex-politicians capitalize on that fame.

For instance, the usual buckraking speech tour of big Wall Street banks that ex-politicians routinely carry out is objectionable because of corruption. Do bankers really care about hearing some probably platitudinous 40-minute speech? No, they are paying for access to potential future senators and presidents, and to create the reward pathway of banker-friendly politicos getting plausibly-deniable bribes if they govern the way bankers want.

Leftists and even liberals like Matt Yglesias argued that Barack Obama should not have taken a $400,000 fee to speak at the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald because it undermines the legitimacy of his (incredibly banker-friendly) bailout record. "Did you really avoid breaking up the big banks because you thought it would undermine financial stability, or were you on the take?" writes Yglesias. But nobody cared about the much larger $65 million book advance Obama got, because there isn't some Big Reader lobby that is pushing for book subsidies or something.

And unlike President Trump, Sanders doesn't have some vast business empire. On the contrary, even with his book money he is still towards the bottom of the congressional net worth rankings, with wealth of about $1 million — a tiny fraction of Rep. Greg Gianforte's (R-Mont.) $136 million or Rep. Jared Polis' (D-Colo.) $122 million.

Nor is there any suggestion that Sanders would moderate his anti-plutocratic politics to benefit him personally. On the contrary, he promised to raise his taxes sharply in the statement accompanying the release of his returns: "I will continue to fight to make our tax system more progressive so that our country has the resources to guarantee the American Dream to all people." Indeed, Sanders would no doubt love to have had much higher taxes in the past so as to keep his wealth from getting even that high. As James Adomian's Sanders parody character put it in a video about him scrambling to finish his tax return: "They are not taxing me at a high enough rate. Jane, is there any way we can pay an alternative maximum tax?"

It would be wise for Sanders to make these points explicitly. So far he has been (as usual) a little prickly about his money, saying "I didn't know it was a crime to write a good book." A little jaunty humor about soaking himself to pay for Medicare-for-all would go a long way.

Still, there is something peculiar in the notion that only personally impoverished people can hold leftist views — as if one can't be a critic of capitalism and own an iPhone. The effect is to foreclose any realistic leftist politics, since poor people have zero political power — and as we have seen, anyone who becomes a national figure becomes rich almost automatically. Of course, wealth often does influence someone's views, but it's not determinative — the most egalitarian president in American history, Franklin Roosevelt, was a scion of extreme wealth and privilege, far richer than Sanders will ever be.

Imagine this: a woman, gunning to become the first female president, who has broadly lefty politics focused on social and economic justice, and who demonstrates careful attention to policy detail. While not a socialist, she accepts the need for drastic reforms to fix an ailing American society. Sounds familiar, no doubt, because it's how both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have presented themselves.

When out of office, she and her husband used their high profile to rake in gobs of cash hand over fist. From 2001 to 2015 they made more than $153 million giving speeches — including at least $7.7 million to big Wall Street banks.

By 2015, her previous politics had fallen out of favor, and she turned on a dime to portray herself as a Barbara Lee-esque progressive. There's nothing wrong with changing one's mind when previous ideas turn out badly, of course, but the problem was the palpable insincerity. Clinton talked like a leftist college professor while rolling out a complicated, milquetoast anti-poverty program and misrepresenting her opponent's health-care plan. Even when she came around to a half-decent platform after the convention, she barely mentioned it in her campaign advertising, preferring to attack Trump's character.

It was beyond obvious that she planned to govern just like her husband and Barack Obama — catering first and foremost to banks and other rich elites, but with a few small goodies thrown to the working class every now and then.

Clinton's conscience is not absent, of course, but she has regularly subordinated moral values to perceived political necessity. Indeed, Warren herself once told of seeing this characteristic firsthand in an interview with Bill Moyers. Back in the '90s, she had convinced Clinton that a bankruptcy bill would harm women and children. Clinton then went back to the White House and convinced her husband to veto the bill.

But when the same bill came up when she was in the Senate, Clinton voted for it. Moyers asked why, and Warren responded:

As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different. It’s a well-financed industry. You know a lot of people don’t realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry, was not pharmaceuticals. It was consumer credit products. Those are the people. The credit card companies have been giving money, and they have influence … She has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency. [Elizabeth Warren]

In other words, Clinton had been corrupted. She got bought off. She deliberately harmed the vast majority of her constituents to benefit a few rich elites who could give her lots of campaign donations — plus comfy sinecures and paid speeches after leaving office, which don't go to populist crusaders.

Warren, by contrast, has consistently held anti-plutocratic politics even when they've come at a price. Though she started out as a conservative Republican early in life, she moved to the left after studying the wreckage of individual bankruptcies and then fighting and losing the effort to stop Republicans and moderate Democrats from making the bankruptcy system much worse in 2005. Radicalized by the experience, she became a crusader for consumer rights, and convinced Democrats to put a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Dodd-Frank financial reform.

But Republicans (and Democratic hesitation) blocked her from running the agency she designed, so she ran for Senate in 2012. That's the sort of political price that genuine populists end up paying sometimes.

As a presidential candidate, Warren's policy proposals are actually threatening to American oligarchs, and she evinces every intention of carrying them out as president. She wants to bust up corporate monopolies and oligopolies, and sharply regulate abusive tech platforms. She correctly wants to get rid of the filibuster, and has a decent proposal for guaranteed child care. She wants stiff tax hikes on the ultra-rich — a wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million, a larger one on those over $1 billion, and a 7-percent tax on corporate profits over $100 million. (In 2018, at least 60 Fortune 500 companies paid zero tax or even got a refund on tens of billions in profits, including titans like Amazon, IBM, Netflix, and Activision Blizzard.)

Where Clinton mainly valued the appearance of being a policy wonk (remember the lavish articles about how she had rooms full of policy experts?), Warren is a genuine obsessive — and more importantly, values policy in terms of being able to improve the lives of the broad population, not just demonstrate her own competence.

Currently Warren is bumping along somewhere around fifth place in most polls for the 2020 nomination, with about 6 percent support, which is surprising. If you liked how Clinton sounded in 2016, Warren is the woman for you.

On March 23, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) gave a speech about her views on Islam, religious civil rights, and the threat posed by anti-Muslim bigotry following the Christchurch massacre. More than two weeks later (following the duplicitous Andrew Breitbart script to the letter), conservatives have cherry-picked four words from her speech and twisted them wildly out of context to suggest Omar was downplaying the 9/11 attacks.

On Thursday, the New York Postblasted the quote on its front page, together with a photo of 9/11 and a screaming headline: "Here's your something: 2,977 people dead from terrorism." The none-too-subtle implication is that Omar herself is somehow responsible for 9/11, because she is a Muslim. It's absolutely vile bigotry, which could very possibly incite violence against Muslims.

So here are the details from Omar's speech (which is quite good and worth watching in full, by the way). After discussing some of the many ways rampant anti-Muslim prejudice is expressed in American society, she says the following:

Here's the truth: far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen. And frankly I'm tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and then all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. [Ilhan Omar]

That's the source of the line conservatives are using to whip up a storm of bigotry. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) led the charge:

First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as “some people who did something”.

On Fox and Friends, Brian Kilmeade said: "You have to wonder if she is an American first." Further down the right-wing media food chain, others made the sentiments a lot more plain. While discussing Omar on Instagram, far-right activist Laura Loomer accused her of treason and said, "Islam is a cancer on humanity and Muslims should not be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country." With that she's echoing the teachings of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who has used fake statistics to argue that the majority of the world's Muslims — some 800 million people, by his count — are dangerous radicals. (Also, in early March a West Virginia GOP Day event featured a poster directly linking Omar to 9/11.)

President Trump has not yet commented on this controversy, but he has repeatedly attacked Omar for "assaulting Jews" (for calling his adviser Stephen Miller a "white nationalist") and demanded she resign for criticizing Israel.

In context, it is absolutely beyond question that Omar was not downplaying 9/11, she was simply pointing out the injustice of all 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide being blamed for a small number of people committing a horrible atrocity. She's not even avoiding mentioning that the attackers were Muslim — on the contrary, it is taken for granted in the logic of her entire speech that everyone she is talking about is Muslim. No less than George W. Bush made this point in a speech before Congress after 9/11:

I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying in effect to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. [George W. Bush]

Bush would, of course, go on to oversee numerous atrocities against Muslims. But rhetorically at least, he agreed with Omar's basic sentiment.

The only thing you could quibble with is Omar saying that CAIR — a blandly inoffensive Muslim rights organization akin to the NAACP, which conservatives nevertheless constantly accuse of being affiliated with terrorism or itself terrorist — was founded after 9/11, when in fact it was founded in 1994. (Though it did dramatically step up its advocacy after 9/11, for obvious reasons.)

What you can't quibble with is that right-wing terrorists are getting the subtext of these conservative messages loud and clear. The Quebec City mosque shooter was a big fan of Trump, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Ben Shapiro. The Christchurch mosque shooter praised Trump as a "symbol of white identity."

And just this week — before this latest ginned-up frenzy of hatred — a New York man was arrested and charged with threatening to assassinate Omar herself. According to the charging document, he told a staffer: "Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she's a fucking terrorist. I'll put a bullet in her fucking skull." The FBI interviewer reported that he "stated he was a patriot, that he loves the president, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government."

Most Democratic presidential candidates, pushed by Bernie Sanders, are proposing big new spending programs, like Medicare-for-all or a new child tax credit. The party's traditional deficit-phobia seems to be fading over time.

Moderate Democrats don't like this one bit, so Rep. Ben McAdams (Utah) with the 27-member Blue Dog caucus has a replacement proposal. It's not only bad, it's of the most blisteringly stupid ideas out of the Republican policy playbook: a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. It doesn't bode well for the Blue Dogs' political future.

During the Obama years, Republicans routinely pushed bills advancing a balanced budget amendment. Any economist with a quarter of a brain — from conservatives to socialists — responded that a strict no-borrowing requirement would instantly create a shattering recession and crash the global economy. Federal borrowing props up demand both inside the U.S. and in all countries that export to it; a huge dose of austerity to balance the budget would result in an instant giant recession.

Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury bonds are the foundation of the international finance system, because the dollar is the world's major reserve currency. Foreign countries need dollar assets to settle their international accounts, and U.S. debt is the safest one out there. That's (mostly) why almost every foreign country has at least some holdings of American debt. Until something comes along to replace it (perhaps the Chinese renminbi, or Keynesian "bancor"), the dollar's status as reserve currency gives America an advantage of cheaper borrowing — even with the ballooning Trump deficits, government interest payments as a share of GDP are a mere 1.59 percent, about half what they were in the 90s — but it's one which must be maintained by continuing to supply dollar assets.

It's even idiotic if you accept the moronic "governments are like a household" canard. Households don't always balance their budgets — sometimes they, you know, take out loans to buy a car, a house, or get through a rough patch.

Now, the Republican proposals were 100 percent bad faith trolling. When they got power in 2017, they instantly pushed for a gigantic tax cut for the rich that exploded the deficit — just like they did when George W. Bush became president.

And to be fair, McAdams' proposed amendment would not be so draconian as the fake Republican versions. It would contain exceptions for war, recessions, and also protect Social Security and Medicare from cuts. Given that the U.S. is in a seemingly endless war on terrorism, and war spending plus Social Security and Medicare make up about 55 percent of the federal budget, it's unclear what this would mean in practice.

Still, the results could be disastrous. Medicaid is pointedly not included among protected programs, and neither are food stamps, refundable portions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, nor sundry other programs to help the middle class and poor. Depending on how the amendment is designed, these programs — which arepopular in addition to being vitally important for many families — might get gored.

But the political background here is perhaps the most jaw-droppingly stupid part of the whole mess. This sort of austerity mania is the single biggest reason the Democrats got swept out of Congress in the 2010 midterms. Centrist Democrats and Obama himself pivoted to deficit reduction by early 2010, abandoning stimulus to create jobs while unemployment was still about 10 percent. The result was crushing defeat — especially for the Blue Dogs themselves, who lost 22 of their 46 seats.

At least this time the Blue Dogs have included an exception for recessions. But if they aren't convinced by the stone obvious arguments that austerity is bad policy, one would think that losing their seats en masse directly because of austerity might lead them to rethink things. But nope! They've learned nothing, and forgotten everything.

McAdams complains that "In my district, fiscal responsibility matters." It doesn't, actually. People care about their political goals and concrete material circumstances. People will say they're worried about the deficit, but as Greg Sargent notes at The Washington Post, President Trump has blown it sky-high and still gets 58 percent approval on the economy because unemployment is low and wages are growing. And insofar as people express concern about the deficit, it's because of generations of well-funded propaganda and endless scaremongering from the so-called nonpartisan media. Even Gallup has long been running what amount to pro-austerity push polls in which the deficit is presumed to be a major problem.

The Blue Dogs need to either learn a few of the economic lessons of the last decade, or be replaced by candidates who have.

Climate change is a serious threat to human society. But even the most extreme worst-case future scenario wouldn't wipe out humanity instantly. There's only one thing that might do that — a major asteroid or comet impact.

Big asteroid strikes are very rare, of course, but if one were to come along, we would all be dead in a matter of months — and while a small one wouldn't be so bad, it could still cause devastating losses. It sounds a bit silly, but there is a very strong case for the American government to set up a planetary asteroid defense system. It wouldn't cost much — just a few satellites and telescopes to keep track of all potential threats, and developing some collision or gravity-based techniques to deflect them if necessary.

The New Yorker recently published a fascinating profile of a paleontologist named Robert DePalma who has discovered what appears to be fossils of animals who died in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. It has been widely accepted that a big asteroid impact in Mexico probably caused the extinction, but until DePalma's discoveries in the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota, nobody had found dinosaur fossils very close to the Cretaceous-Paleogene geological boundary layer (suggesting that perhaps they died out earlier than the impact). If DePalma is right, it will be a landmark finding for the field.

Pretty cool science! But the article also has a harrowing description of what happened when the Chicxulub impactor (a comet or asteroid, perhaps 11-81 kilometers wide) smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, creating a crater 93 miles in diameter. First came fire, as the kinetic energy released by the impact scorched everything in a 1,500-mile radius, and red-hot ejecta landed all around the world. Continent-wide firestorms burned up about 70 percent of all the world's forests, and huge tsunamis tore up the Gulf of Mexico. Then it got a lot worse:

The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About 75 percent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt. [The New Yorker]

Big land animals fared particularly poorly — virtually everything weighing more than 5 kilograms was wiped out. Mammals at that time were mostly small, so the ones that survived were able to evolve into larger species after the ecosystem began to recover.

In the history of our planet, that's almost as bad as it gets (only the Permian-Triassic extinction was worse). But it's worth noting that even a small asteroid can cause enormous damage. In 2013, one only about 66-feet wide exploded in the sky near Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia, shattering windows across the city and causing about 1,500 injuries. The explosion was as powerful as a large nuclear weapon — a direct hit on a major city would have killed millions.

So what do we do? The first thing is to track and record all the near-Earth objects, which is already underway with many projects across the globe and in space. Years ago, Congress required NASA to track 90 percent of objects one kilometer and over, which was accomplished as of 2011 — but smaller ones are still being racked up by the thousands. All told, nearly 20,000 near-Earth objects have been found at time of writing. Meanwhile, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an automated system to detect which objects are a threat.

Then once every threatening object is tracked, we just need a way to deflect them. Laser light might exert enough pressure if it was caught early enough, as you'd only have to change the trajectory by a tiny bit. (This calls for extreme accuracy, as you don't want to accidentally deflect something into the planet.) You could accomplish the same thing with a probe's gravity — or you could crash the probe into it at high speed. Indeed, NASA is planning to launch a test probe for just this purpose in 2020 or 2021.

All the ingredients are there. But there is a distinct lack of urgency here. The best way to view asteroids and comets is with a space telescope. But NASA is using a repurposed old one that was meant to be turned off in 2011, and canceled their funding of a different one in 2015. If planetary defense were treated with the urgency it clearly requires, we wouldn't be screwing around with elderly equipment that was designed for a different purpose, or testing just one method of asteroid deflection every few years. We'd be doing it all as fast as possible.

Luckily, a fresh telescope or three, and full-throttle research on all deflection techniques would only take a few hundred million dollars in total — much less than the $2.5 billion President Trump wants to spend on his goofy "Space Force" alone. It's simply a matter of responsible government.

One of the biggest problems that has bedeviled Democratic Party attempts to reform the janky American health-care system is fear of backlash. About half the population is insured with private, employer-based coverage, leading liberals to adopt a defensive posture. "A lot of people love having their employer-based insurance," says Nancy Pelosi.

But this reasoning leaves aside an important fact — the private insurance system isitself constantly knocking people off their insurance. There is no way to reform the system in a way that will simultaneously preserve private insurance and not be blamed for people losing their coverage, because the private system is so inherently unstable.

While ObamaCare was being discussed and negotiated, Democrats twisted themselves into knots trying not to fuss with the private insurance system too much. Thus during the 2008 campaign and afterwards, Barack Obama said some version of "if you like your insurance, you can keep it" dozens and dozens of times.

This line blew up in his face spectacularly. One of the objectives of ObamaCare was to clean up employer-based insurance. This made perfect sense, in the context of the ObamaCare approach — before the law, there was a substantial market in absolute garbage policies that didn't really cover anything (which are coming back thanks to Trump, by the way), and lot more with gaps in their coverage. New regulations on guaranteed coverage standards, the medical loss ratio, and so on made employer-based insurance considerably better — but also required substantial restructuring of the market, which destroyed a lot of policies.

Conservatives and the mainstream media had a screaming fit — especially so-called fact-checkers, who are always on the lookout for liberal flubs to give them nonpartisan cred (PolitiFact labeled Obama's claim as "lie of the year" in 2013).

But critically, the freakout was given major strength by the background condition of people being constantly kicked off their insurance. People switch jobs often, and employers routinely shop around for different or cheaper coverage. As Matt Bruenig details, a Michigan study shows that fully 28 percent of people on an employer-sponsored plan were not on the same plan a year later. About half of the population — or 160 million people — is on private insurance. If that's a representative study (and it's surely in the right ballpark), that means about 45 million insurance loss events annually, or 3.7 million per month.

Obama didn't get in trouble over his broken promise because people are deeply in love with their (increasingly crummy and expensive) private insurance. He got in trouble because it was a stupid promise that was logically impossible to fulfill, and he couldn't have avoided sounding like an outright liar. No matter what health-care reform passes, so long as private insurance exists conservatives will always be able to point to millions of people losing their existing coverage and blame it on the reform.

As an aside, it's also worth noting that the ObamaCare exchanges also require people to shop for new insurance every year as a matter of design — and anytime an insurer withdraws from the exchange, which happens all the time, everyone on its plans gets kicked off. Bit of an odd choice from people who are supposedly obsessed with the backlash problem.

At any rate, all this demonstrates the only way around the backlash hurdle — be honest with the public, and hold out the promise of good coverage that is actually permanent, like Medicare-for-all. Yes, if you have private coverage, you will lose it — but in return you'll get something really good that will stay with you for life. No more worrying that losing your job means your whole family losing their coverage, and possibly being driven into bankruptcy, or staying in a lousy job just because you need the insurance. (Medicare also has the advantage of being widely understood already, so fear of the unknown is reduced.)

Conversely, trying to design a health-care reform that preserves private insurance is inescapably vulnerable to backlash, because constant insurance loss is built into the private system. Moderates trying to tiptoe around the backlash problem end up being deceptive about what their plans would do, just like Obama did, which only fuels the backlash — for instance, Medicare-for-some proposals described as letting "people keep employment-based insurance" would absolutely kick millions off their coverage.

Indeed, if framed properly, this could be a powerful argument for universal Medicare. As Bruenig writes, "Critics of Medicare-for-all are right to point out that losing your insurance sucks. But the only way to stop that from happening to people is to create a seamless system where people do not constantly churn on and off of insurance." If we want good coverage that everyone can really keep forever, simply scrap the stupid, inefficient private system and sweep the whole population onto the same high-quality program. As usual, good old Big Government is the best way to go.

Is the Democratic Party becoming a mirror image of Donald Trump's Republican Party? Galloping leftist "extremism" — helped along by the populist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has centrists and conservatives fainting like myotonic goats at a fireworks show, from Dana Milbank at TheWashington Post to former George W. Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner at The Atlantic.

However, Wehner's alarmist article inadvertently demonstrates the problem with this kind of panic-mongering — a lack of real consideration whether Sanders might be right about anything, or whether his politics fit at all with America's previous traditions. In reality, the growing Sanders tendency in the party mostly reflects it coming to its senses.

"To more fully grasp the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party," writes Wehner, his glasses steaming up in outrage, he runs through a list of Sanders-style policies. He asserts they would be "fiscally ruinous, invest massive and unwarranted trust in central planners, and weaken America's security."

First up is the Green New Deal. After describing it at least somewhat fairly as an effort to de-carbonize the economy as fast as possible while making it more egalitarian, he writes: "It would be astronomically costly and constitute by far the greatest centralization of power in American history." That's the sum total of his argument against it.

As usual for self-style moderates, Wehner does not even attempt to grapple with the threat posed by climate change, nor consider how much might be worth paying to stop it. The cost of a Green New Deal would be large, but so would letting half of south Florida drown. Freaking out about cost when facing clockwork costly climate disasters is an elementary failure of reasoning.

Meanwhile, describing a Green New Deal as an unprecedented centralization of power is historically illiterate. During the Second World War, the government routinely nationalized whole industries, conducted economy-wide price controls and rationing, and, you know, conscripted millions of men into the military to fight and die. The Green New Deal would involve some flexing of government power to be sure, but probably not even on the scale of the original New Deal. For instance, at its height in the mid-1930s, the Public Works Administration alone was consuming half the concrete output and one-third of the steel output of the entire country. The Green New Deal would have to be very big, but probably not that big.

In sum, Sanders is building on a cherished Democratic Party tradition (whose construction projects are still being used to this day across the country) to address a critical policy emergency. Scared yet??

Next up is Medicare-for-all, which Wehner asserts would be unpopular because of an insurance industry study showing 70 percent of people on employer-sponsored insurance are happy with it, and because the plan "would exacerbate the worst efficiencies of an already highly inefficient program."

This first point is deceptive, and the second is straight-up backwards. It's true that, per Gallup, 69 percent of people with employer-based coverage do say they are satisfied with it — but 77 percent of people on Medicaresay the same thing. (Seniors aren't generally thrown into a panic when they turn 65 and get pretty good guaranteed coverage for the rest of their life.)

As for efficiency, the fragmented and heavily employer-based American insurance system is already by far the most wasteful in the world. Relative to the second-most expensive country, Switzerland, we spend about 5 points of GDP extra — or a trillion bucks, every year. Medicare is considerably more efficient than private coverage, with lower prices and much lower administrative spending. With some reforms — particularly allowing negotiation with drug companies — it could be more efficient still. Wehner simply doesn't know what he's talking about.

So Sanders understands correctly that the janky employer-based health care system is slowly crushing the economy and proposes building on one of the greatest successes of President Lyndon Johnson to fix it. Everyone hide under the bed!!

To be sure, a President Bernie Sanders would probably be the furthest-left president in history, surpassing Franklin Roosevelt by a bit. But FDR was also the best president in history — unlike Wehner, a man who recognized that large problems like economic depression and global war against fascism require large solutions. Indeed, in some areas Sanders is to his right — his proposed 70 percent top marginal tax rate is far short of FDR's 94 percent rate (much less the maximum income he tried to pass), and bites in at a much higher income.

As such, Sanders is squarely within the reformist-radical American tradition — someone who wants to build on previous accomplishments to make the United States a more decent and equal society. It's as simple as that.

What is causing the refugee crisis in Central America? One major fuel is the war on drugs, as I have previously written. But another under-discussed factor is climate change, which has devastated many farms in Central America. These climate refugees are just the first glimmerings of a problem that is going to plague the world for the foreseeable future.

The PBS News Hour recently ran an excellent report on how climate problems are driving many farmers out of business in Honduras. One issue is drought — over the last decade or so, warming temperatures have created chronic rain shortfalls over much of the country, destroying whole crops and rendering traditional planting techniques impossible. Poorer farmers are even finding subsistence agriculture out of the question:

Don Alfredo says, 10 years ago, he could harvest around 4,000 pounds of corn each season. Now he says he's lucky if he gets around 500. He says he's lost over 90 percent of his crop, and what was left wasn't even enough to live on. [News Hour]

Elsewhere in the coffee business (Honduras is the fifth-largest coffee exporter in the world), high temperatures are fueling epidemics of rust fungus, or roya. If the temperature gets below 77 degrees Fahrenheit, then the fungus slows down sharply. But if it stays that hot continually, it quickly wipes out whole plantations.

Incidentally, a similar process has fueled an epidemic of bark beetle infestation in the American West. It used to be that winters would regularly get cold enough to kill off most of the beetles and their eggs. But without that limiting process, beetle populations have grown exponentially. From 2000-2017 beetles destroyed some 85,000 square miles of American forest.

At any rate, this also demonstrates the brutal logic driving refugee movements. The Hondurans interviewed by PBS know all about Trump, his deportation squads, and his camps. Indeed, Don Alfredo has already attempted to cross the border once and been caught and deported. But they simply have no other choice. It's take the risk, or starve.

One can imagine the Republican response to this: Just keep them out. However, Americans are fooling themselves if they think clamping down the southern border is going to save them from climate refugees. For one thing, the border is very long and hard to secure. It would take a full-blown police state to stop a real refugee flood, should one get going.

But more importantly, millions of climate refugees are unquestionably going to come from inside the United States as well. The Miami metro area, for instance, has a population of over six million and an average elevation of about 6 feet — and much of Miami is even lower. Sea levels have already increased by about 9 inches since the 1880s, and are increasing by about 3.3 millimeters per year. Miami Beach already experiences chronic flooding from mere high tides. Projections for 2100 predict an additional rise of anywhere from another foot to over 8 feet, depending on how things shake out — and that's leaving out worst-case scenarios like the rapid collapse of one of the major ice sheets. After 2100, of course, seas will only continue to rise for thousands of years.

What's more, it's nearly impossible to build seawalls around Miami, because it is built on permeable limestone. Real estate developers may be in a state of abject denial about this, but great chunks of Florida will almost certainly be abandoned over the coming decades, and millions of people will have to find somewhere else to live.

And that's just one city and one vector of climate change — other coastal communities around the country are vulnerable to sea level rise in varying degrees, and others further inland are vulnerable to drought, flooding, wildfires, economic dislocation, and so on.

The smart and humane thing to do would be to extend some humanitarian and economic aid to Central America and U.S. communities alike, as part of a general climate policy package to increase resilience and slash carbon emissions. Letting Honduras collapse into ruin is not just immoral, it will create vast problems for the U.S. as well.

Of course, our petulant president wants to slash aid to Central America. But Republican governance on climate change is an epic disaster for the United States as well. Donald Trump and the GOP will let American cities drown or burn to cinders out of pure culture war grievance, the narrow interests of fossil fuel barons, and their own intellectual degeneration.

Donald Trump is the first president since Jimmy Carter not to release his tax returns to the public. He and his surrogates have deployed a battery of ever-shifting excuses for this, most commonly that he is under some audit. An audit, of course, doesn't prevent anyone from releasing their return, and audits hardly ever take three years. There may never have been an audit in the first place.

It's obvious Trump will not release his tax returns, ever. The only way the American public will get them is if someone forces them out. House Democrats have the clear legal authority to get those returns. So far they have inexplicably failed to even try. They — in particular House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) — need to stop being such babies and get it done.

Here's the legal background. As Steven Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center writes, a section of 26 U.S. Code § 6103 states that if the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee submits a written request for any tax return, the treasury secretary "shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request." Documents that identify an individual taxpayer just have to be seen in closed executive session. From there, the committee can decide to send them on to the full House: "Any return or return information obtained by or on behalf of such committee pursuant to the provisions of this subsection may be submitted by the committee to the Senate or the House of Representatives, or to both." The House can then vote to release them publicly, if they wish.

Moreover, oversight of conflicts of interest is literally the entire reason this law came about in the first place. It was passed in 1924, in response to the Teapot Dome scandal and then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's refusal to reveal his possible conflicts of interest.

That sort of thing is exactly why the American people deserve to see Trump's tax returns. No president has ever continued to operate a vast business empire while in office. The conflicts of interests — plus instances of blatantly abusing his power to enrich himself — probably number in the hundreds. The man is plainly a crook.

So legally, it's open-and-shut — indeed, as Harry Litman writes, "there is not a single case suggesting that the secretary has discretion not to comply with such a written request by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee."

Of course, Trump is probably not just going to hand his returns over simply because the law says he has to. He'll kick up a big fuss, try to drag it out in the courts, yell about how Democrats are doing a WITCH HUNT, and so on. That's our president for you.

This appears to be why Neal is taking an ultra-cautious approach. "This has to be part of a carefully prepared and documented legal case," he said in January. "It will be done judiciously and methodically, but it will be done." He's not even promising he'll try to get it done before the 2020 election.

This reasoning is moronic. As Greg Sargent writes at The Washington Post, Trump's contempt for the law militates in the opposite direction. They should instead kick up their own fuss to put maximum pressure on the administration — holding press conferences to demand the returns, subpoenaing people to testify, and so on. Some Democrats are reportedly worried that they might violate the law by improperly disclosing the returns, but the same is true of the administration — if Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin refuses to turn over the returns, he will be breaking the law. That's called leverage.

Indeed, treating this as a major scandal actually strengthens the legal argument. This isn't some matter of arcane technical dispute. It's an instance of blatant lawbreaking and interference with Congress' constitutional responsibilities. Making out as though it's some super-complicated issue creates the impression of legal uncertainty where none is present, while going slow casts doubt on the oversight rationale. If it is vitally important for Congress to see the president's returns, why on Earth aren't they trying to get them as fast as possible?

It's also a winning political issue. Sixty percent of Americans say Democrats should force Trump to release his returns — and railing against a billionaire oligarch president for not coming clean with the public about his money cuts into his populist persona.

Democrats like Neal appear to believe that the way to be "responsible" is to be timid about wielding power. But when faced with corruption like Trump's, the actually responsible thing to do is to fight hard. Constitutional principles don't defend themselves. It's time for Neal and company to step up and assert themselves.

The new Medicaid work requirements in southern states — which have thrown 18,000 people off their insurance in Arkansas — have been struck down. Judge James E. Boasberg of the DC Circuit Court ruled Kentucky and Arkansas hadn't justified their programs adequately, and so they're out at least for now. No doubt further legal action is forthcoming.

That's a good outcome for the beleaguered residents of these states. But it also demonstrates the extent to which American policy is made by the courts — who are usually terrible at it.

An even more stark example of judicial legislating was revealed in a new biography of John Roberts. Apparently during the NFIB v. Sebelius negotiations, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer essentially traded votes to make the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion optional in return for Chief Justice Roberts supporting the individual mandate.

The actual decision, of course, clumsily papered over its motivation with legal rhetoric. But this is classic legislative horse-trading: swapping votes on policy matters to get to a workable compromise. At bottom, it had nothing to do with the law as written or the Constitution, and everything to do with the balance of partisan power on the court.

What's more, it was incompetent legislating. The ObamaCare exchanges are the worst part of the law, while the Medicaid expansion is the best — indeed, it turns out the individual mandate is largely unnecessary, as exchanges have continued to function about the same without it. The liberals Kagan and Breyer should have made the opposite trade, but instead they denied Medicaid to 2.5 million people for basically nothing in return.

One reason why is likely that Supreme Court justices are not health-care policy experts, nor do they have a policy staff to work it out for them, nor some democratic constituency that might be able to pressure them to vote one way or another. "Indeed, for all those reasons it's broadly considered inappropriate for the courts to rule on these cases on the basis of policy desirability," as Matthew Yglesias writes.

This goes all the way back to Marbury v. Madison, the famous 1803 decision that established judicial review — the principle that the courts can invalidate legislation they think violates the Constitution, despite the fact such a power is nowhere mentioned in that document.

None other than Thomas Jefferson was scathingly critical of this doctrine. In a letter, he wrote:

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. [Letter to William Jarvis]

As Richard White writes in his history of the Gilded Age, The Republic for Which It Stands, the courts became de facto rulers of the country in many aspects during this period. "Judges and courts became basic sites of state building, performing functions in the United States that bureaucracies undertook in other countries," he writes. Some vital decisions — like enshrining the notion of corporate personhood — were not even explained.

Instead of policy being written by the legislature to serve the interests of a majority constituency, then implemented by a legible state bureaucracy, in the United States a great deal of legislating happens through an unaccountable legal priesthood, whose very policy aims have be disguised by arcane rhetoric. The results speak for themselves.

Most other developed nations do not have this kind of hypertrophied legal system — in Denmark, for instance, courts have only invalidated a parliamentary law once. Neither conservatives nor social democrats there can get what they want by stuffing the courts with partisan hacks. They've just got to win elections. It might be worth trying someday.

American infrastructure is in poor shape. Roads and bridges are routinely falling apart, and many government agencies are far behind on their upkeep — the National Park Service alone estimates it has a maintenance backlog of nearly $12 billion.

This no doubt motivates Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar's new proposal for a $1 trillion infrastructure package. There's much to like about it, particularly the scale. But it also reveals a warped set of priorities and a lack of understanding about the biggest problem with American infrastructure — namely, cost.

First, the good. A trillion bucks is a good starting point. American infrastructure both needs a lot of repairs and a major expansion — particularly for rail and public transit. It's good to see her endorse plans to "[reduce] our energy consumption overhaul our rail infrastructure when it comes to freight and passenger rail, and bring high-speed rail to more communities." The mention of freight is a bit odd, given that America's freight rail system is actually quite good, but it probably needs work too.

She also proposes investments in rural internet access, climate-friendly investments, and flood protection, which are all good ideas.

As an aside, it is amusing to see Klobuchar casually propose $650 billion in direct federal infrastructure spending (the rest is supposed to come from private sources and bond sales) when she dismissed free four-year college — which would cost only about $70 billion per year — as too expensive. Centrists often hide their ideological priorities behind "we can't afford it" rhetoric.

But this brings me to the first problem: priorities. Public transit gets third billing, while the top slot goes (as usual) to cars — spending to "Repair and replace our roads, highways, and bridges." At a minimum, this is backwards. The mid-20th century movement to orient the entire American built environment around automobiles was a catastrophe for functional urbanism and public health. Driving kills tens of thousands a year through accidents, tens of thousands more through air pollution, and tens of thousands more by encouraging an unhealthy lifestyle. Moreover, cars are a fundamentally stupid and inefficient way to move people around in a confined space — creating both epic traffic congestion in cities and sprawl that increases carbon pollution and loneliness.

Now, we can't just re-engineer American cities to become like Paris or London overnight, so no doubt we will have to spend something on road upkeep. But a big infrastructure package should certainly lean against highways and sprawl, and towards density. In particular, cities should seriously consider tearing out arterial freeways in their urban cores, which destroyed huge dense neighborhoods that badly need to be rebuilt — and putting the saved maintenance dollars (plus additional tax revenue) towards transit.

The second problem is even more important: cost. Klobuchar says nothing about the stupendous cost bloat in American construction, which would strangle any of the projects worth doing she proposes. For instance, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently canceled the high-speed rail project to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, mainly due to poor planning and 10 years of spiraling budget overruns. Elsewhere, New York just took 10 years to build a measly three subway stops at a cost of $4.5 billion — about equal to the price of Grand Coulee Dam (volume: nearly four times that of the Great Pyramid at Giza) in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Just what the problem here is hard to figure out. As Alon Levy argues, it appears American government at all levels is doing basically everything wrong — the procurement is bad, the engineering is bad, the choice of construction techniques is bad, the management is bad, and projects are continually larded up with expensive political goodies. Essentially no one with power is even trying to do things efficiently or cheaply, probably because they don't know how or care to know. The California high-speed rail project, for instance, featured a ludicrous detour to Palmdale that cost $5 billion and increased trip time by 12 minutes.

At a minimum, I would suggest some kind of commission to study the cost disaster in depth, which would give infrastructure advocates a set of best practices and talking points to rally around. But if America wants to finally bring its infrastructure up to the level of Japan in the 1950s (let alone the 21st century), political leaders are going to have to do something. Otherwise we could easily waste the whole trillion bucks on a handful of freeway overpasses and boondoggles.

How do we eradicate HIV/AIDS? One route is a vaccine, but so far that has proved a very difficult research problem. There is an ongoing clinical trial of one promising treatment in South Africa, but unlike the smallpox or polio vaccines, it appears to provide only moderate protection. Another is "pre-exposure prophylaxis," or PrEP — drugs which prevent HIV infection if taken every day. One such treatment called emtricitabine/tenofovir (better known by its brand name Truvada) works very well for this, cutting the risk of infection by up to 93 percent.

But there is a problem. As The Washington Post reports, in the United States, Truvada is monopolized by the pharmaceutical giant Gilead, which charges between $1,600 and $2,000 a month for the treatment (the wholesale price is $1,414). Bizarrely, the studies proving Truvada works for PrEP were conducted and paid for almost entirely by the federal government (the Gates Foundation also helped). The Centers for Disease Control even holds a patent on this specific treatment.

Yet the government is doing nothing to prevent this outrageous price-gouging, which places a near-insurmountable barrier to getting the drug out to all who need it. It's an object lesson in the dangers of allowing private companies to profiteer off government research.

First, some background. Truvada was originally developed to treat people who already had HIV, as part of the usual suite of anti-retroviral medications to slow down the virus' progress. Two government-funded scientists proved it could be used to prevent transmission — first Thomas Franks at the CDC, who demonstrated it worked with monkeys, then Robert Grant, who showed the same for humans with a grant from the National Institutes of Health. That work was completed around 2004.

Gilead immediately set about marketing and selling Truvada for PrEP, which brought in $3 billion last year and $36.2 billion since 2004. Yet because of the eye-watering price (and broader dysfunction in the American health-care system), only about 20 percent of the people who need the drug are getting it, and many who do have to navigate hellish bureaucracy to get access. The extreme cost also sucks money away from other priorities, particularly for cash-strapped state Medicaid programs.

Meanwhile, the government isn't even collecting any royalties on this cash cow it paid to develop. Why is that? Georgetown Law Professor Neel U. Sukhatme told the Post it's because government officials want to facilitate private profiteering from government research:

Rather, NIH and CDC officials see their role as encouraging the commercialization of government-financed discoveries, not placing curbs on them, Sukhatme said. That tends to take patent infringement lawsuits off the table. "They may not want to be in the position of suing these companies that arguably are producing valuable stuff," he said. [The Washington Post]

In the first instance, it is outrageous that the government is just handing valuable research it literally paid for itself over to a private company so it can pillage American society. (A month's supply of the drug in South Africa costs about $6.) It should demand drastic price cuts, or license its patent to a generics manufacturer. Indeed, it could just manufacture the drug itself and sell it at cost.

But that reasoning shouldn't stop just at government-funded research. A patent is itself a government creation — a monopoly enforced through the state legal system. The purpose, as the Constitution spells out, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts[.]" Patents, and private pharmaceutical companies in general, are useful only insofar as they lead to the creation of broadly useful inventions and treatments.

Now, drug development is expensive, and there could be a place for private companies in the national research portfolio. But especially for vitally important treatments that are only needed for a small fraction of the population, allowing merciless monopolist price-gouging is simply untenable. For instance, Pharmasset (later purchased by Gilead) developed a genuinely revolutionary cure for Hepatitis C, which affects perhaps 41,000 Americans in acute form. But they charge about $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment.

Incidentally, this kind of thing is why Americans spend roughly twice per person what peer nations in Europe do on pharmaceuticals. It's pure corporate profits.

If we want to eradicate HIV, which infects 40,000 Americans every year (or Hepatitis C, or many other diseases), the obvious best strategy is to make treatment widely available to everyone who needs it as cheap as possible. That's how it was done with smallpox. All people who need PrEP should have ready and dirt-cheap access to Truvada.

And as demonstrated by Franks and Grant, good old government research laboratories and grants work great to keep the drug development pipeline flowing. For private research, antitrust policy like forced patent licensing to stop monopolist price-gouging could keep other prices relatively cheap — or we could set up a prize system for certain key treatments (like new antibiotics), whereby the government makes a large one-time payment to any company that develops one, after which the drug goes into the public domain.

The Trump administration has hit on a new tactic for destroying ObamaCare. Abandoning their previous opinion, Department of Justice lawyers said they will no longer defend the law at all in a two-sentence memo to the Fifth Circuit court.

This demonstrates one thing: Republicans and President Trump are coming for your health insurance, and they will trample both law and democracy to get it.

The administration is now agreeing with a December ruling from District Judge Reed O'Connor. As Nicholas Bagley writes, the reasoning was a dog's breakfast of tendentious gobbledygook. Essentially, O'Connor used congressional debates from the 2010 drafting of the law to argue that the 2017 Congress really meant to repeal the entire law when they simply deleted the ObamaCare individual mandate. It couldn't be more obvious that this is a clumsily reverse-engineered argument to achieve by judicial fiat what the party couldn't do through the legislature (recall that the Republican effort to directly repeal ObamaCare did not pass).

The Trump administration agreeing with O'Connor is a further escalation. The opinion is so nutty that even conservative lawyers have criticized it as nonsensical — and the Trump memo itself doesn't justify the opinion in the slightest, nor explain their change of position. As Bagley writes in another post, it potentially set a precedent where the "sitting administration could pick and choose which laws it wants to defend, and which it wants to throw under the bus. Indeed, the decision not to defend is close cousin to a decision not to enforce the law."

This kind of thing appears to be a key prong of long-term Republican political strategy. First, leverage the enormous pro-GOP bias built into the Senate to hold that chamber. When a Democrat is president, hold as many judicial vacancies open as possible — then when a Republican is president, jam through as many Federalist Society zealots as possible. Once installed, those justices then conduct what amounts to judicial rule-by-decree — cooking up crackpot arguments that all Republican policy is constitutionally required, while all Democratic policy is unconstitutional. Finally, party activists and propaganda organs characterize this strategy as "judicial restraint" and any contrary arguments as "judicial activism," to provide some ideological cover. The contempt for foundational principles of democracy is palpable.

But if upheld by the Supreme Court, this judicial legislation would wreak untold havoc in the American health-care system. Aside from the millions of people who would lose their exchange and Medicaid coverage instantly, ObamaCare structures and regulations have been built (at great effort and cost) into the basic structure of health-care delivery. Simply tearing them out without any replacement would severely damage the employer-based insurance system as well (which is already under terrible strain). The social carnage would be horrific. Tens of thousands of people would die, every year.

Also, this isn't the only attack the Trump administration has proposed on American health care. The latest Trump budget proposed block-granting and capping Medicaid spending, cutting expenditure by $1.5 trillion over 10 years — the same process by which traditional welfare for poor mothers was slowly strangled nearly to death. The budget also proposes $845 billion in cuts to Medicare.

Now, that budget is dead on arrival with Democrats in control of the House of Representatives. But it demonstrates Republican priorities — contrary to Trump's promises as a candidate that he would protect Medicaid and Medicare, as president he would savage America's already-threadbare welfare state.

But this is also a political gift for Democrats. American democracy is not (yet) completely cored out, as we saw in 2018. Indeed, health care polled as the top issue in the 2018 midterms, and Democrats won those voters by a 75-32 margin. It couldn't be clearer that the way to protect (or improve) one's health-care coverage is by voting Republicans out of office. They're simply never going to stop trying to take it away.

The Mueller report summary written by Attorney General Barr was delivered to Congress over the weekend. It quotes the report as follows: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." This has both the Republican right and the Russiagate-skeptic left taking victory laps. "Total EXONERATION," Trump wrote on Twitter. "It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD," wrote Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi.

The discourse around this report has revolved far too much around who gets to gloat about making correct predictions, and whether the media exaggerated this or that, which risks letting the content of the report get lost in the noise. Better by far to focus on the actual facts at hand, which are not at all favorable for Trump.

For my part, I must admit I suspected Mueller would find more direct evidence of some kind of direct coordination between Trump and Russia — if for no other reason than he acted like the guiltiest man alive. If Barr's summary is fair, then I was wrong about that aspect of the story.

However, it is far too much to say even this summary exonerates Trump. For one thing, contrary to many blaring news headlines, the quoted sentence of the report does not say there was no evidence of coordination, but that it "did not establish" it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as the lawyer saying goes.

Also, it does say that Russia conducted a two-front effort to help Trump win the election, through social media propaganda and hacking the emails of various Democratic operations — thus the indictments of dozens of Russian nationals and several Russian companies. And even if Trump did not meet Mueller's notions of coordination or collusion — defined as "agreement—tacit or express" to participate in the above propaganda or hacking efforts — the plain fact is that Trump endorsed the Russian hacking effort on national TV. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens," he said in July 2016.

Most important of all is the issue of obstruction of justice, which is hard to believe Barr didn't find evidence of.

Per the memo, Mueller did not decide one way or another whether Trump committed this crime, instead laying out arguments on both sides and allowing Barr to decide. As Marcy Wheeler points out, in a letter to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein trying to inoculate Trump against being interrogated by Mueller's team, Barr wrote that "if a president knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction." He reaffirmed this perspective in his confirmation hearings when asked by Amy Klobuchar.

Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Trump indirectly pushed him to commit perjury about the Trump Tower Moscow project (for which Cohen is going to prison), and that his testimony was edited by another Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow. CNN and the New York Times have reported that Trump lawyers dangled pardons before Cohen, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort, obviously in an effort to get them to clam up.

Notably, none of the crimes Cohen, Flynn, and Manafort were convicted of were directly related to Russian election interference — but Trump's alleged acts would still constitute obstruction according to the stated views of Attorney General Barr.

Finally, the whole reason there was a special counsel investigation in the first place is because Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey. Trump later told Lester Holt he did it in part for this reason: "And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said 'you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story[.]'" You could hardly ask for a clearer case of obstruction than firing the head of a law enforcement agency because the president doesn't like an investigation into himself.

Instead of following through with his previous promises, Barr exonerates Trump through a ludicrously narrow focus. Because "the evidence does not establish that the president was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference," the case can't be made, he argues. As Wheeler writes, "In giving Trump the all-clear on obstruction charges, Barr appears not to have considered whether Trump obstructed the actual crime in question." In other words, the fix was in (and thus the whole report should be released immediately, so the American people can see what Mueller found for themselves).

And let's remember who we're talking about here. Barr is not Thomas More. He's a replacement for Jeff Sessions — the guy Trump pushed out in part because he recused himself from the Russia investigation. Barr almost certainly got the job due to the above memo, which despite its initial stipulations concludes it is more-or-less impossible for the president to obstruct justice.

The Trump administration's approach here — carried out in concert with Attorney General Barr — is pretty clearly to try to muddy the waters around the Mueller findings to make it appear as though Trump is completely free of sin. In reality, just what is publicly known about the Mueller investigation is incredibly damning. A foreign government interfered with a U.S. election, the Republican candidate embraced it, and the rest of the party leadership connived to preventbipartisan action to stop it. Seven Trump or Republican associates, including Trump's campaign manager, national security adviser, and personal lawyer, have been convicted of various felonies in the biggest white-collar crime investigation in years, and another is on trial.

Breathless hype from cable news personalities and various conspiracy nuts no doubt contributed to the air of liberal disappointment from the denouement of the Mueller saga. But it would be unwise indeed to let resentment of Louise Mensch and Eric Garland push others into helping Trump whitewash his crooked administration.

One of the many awful aspects of living in the United States today is how the nation is beset on all sides with crises — severe inequality, corruption, political rot, and climate change, to pick just a few — while our politics is consumed by imaginary nonsense.

Donald Trump is openly using the presidency to line his pockets; 42 percent of American cancer patients lose their entire life savings; there are clockwork spree shootings across the country; and on and on. Still, great swathes of the country spend every waking minute simply seething with outrage over NFL protests, leftists on elite college campuses, handfuls of bedraggled refugees, and fruitcake conspiracy theories.

But climate change, at least, is not going to sit politely by while America sorts out its diseased politics. It's already here, and it's wrecking huge parts of the country.

The Missouri River has experienced record-breaking flooding over the past week, submerging massive chunks of the Midwest. At time of writing, at least three people have died, and the flood has caused billions in damages and crop losses. As Brian Kahn writes at Gizmodo, flood waters are also stripping away the region's topsoil, badly harming the future productive capacity of the land.

Notably, flood waters also deluged a key Air Force base, quickly outstripping military efforts to pile up sandbags. "Days into the flooding, muddy water was still lapping at almost 80 flooded buildings at Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base, some inundated by up to 7 feet of water," reports the Associated Press.

Offutt is the home of Strategic Command, which helps oversee America's nuclear stockpile. Its "responsibilities include strategic deterrence; nuclear operations; space operations; joint electronic spectrum operations; global strike; missile defense; and analysis and targeting." The Strategic Command headquarters were not drowned, but it was a near thing.

The typical caveat for climate and weather applies here: One can never draw a direct line between warming temperatures and a single weather event, because that's not how climate works. No matter how severe, one flood, heat wave, or snowstorm does not prove or disprove the reality of climate change. Instead, warming conditions change the background likelihood of weather disasters.

But this latest climate disaster demonstrates how absolutely crack-brained the Republican approach to climate policy is. Climate change is right now devastating America's agricultural land, infrastructure, and cities. Flood waters are at the doors of the actual nuclear command bunker — for the second time in a decade. It's going to get much worse if we don't do anything.

Of course, other countries are going to have it considerably worse than the comparatively wealthy United States. Earlier this month, southeast Africa was slammed by Cyclone Adai, one of the worst such storms on record, which devastated Mozambique (where the city of Beira, population 534,000, was 90 percent destroyed), Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. The death toll at time of writing was over 500, with hundreds more certainly to come.

But Americans are fooling ourselves if we think we'll escape unscathed just because our country has money. Even rich celebrities aren't immune, as seen in Malibu recently, where the luxury mansions of multiple A-list actors were burned down by wildfire.

National wealth provides the potential to ameliorate the harms of climate change or, better still, to head it off before disaster strikes. But you have to actually do something with that wealth for it to be of any help. The GOP isn't doing anything. Instead, the Republican Party — still in control of the Senate and the presidency, and in a state of utter moral and intellectual degeneracy — will do everything it can to make things worse.

The Mueller report — the product of the famous investigation into any connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller — has been completed and delivered to Attorney General William Barr.

There is only one possible just outcome: The report must be released to Congress and the public.

Mueller was charged with digging into links between the Trump operation and Russia, as well as "any matters that arose or may arise directly" from that effort. The latter stipulation has already produced multiple convictions, including former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos (lying to the FBI), former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (same), computer whiz Richard Pinedo (helping Russian sources commit identity fraud), lawyer Alex Van der Zwaan (lying to the FBI), former Trump aide Carter Page (conspiracy to defraud the United States, plus multiple financial crimes), former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (multiple financial crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering, and other charges still pending in state court), former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (perjury and campaign finance violations which were referred by Mueller but prosecuted by others), and Samuel Patten (violation of Foreign Agents Registration Act, against referred by Mueller).

Mueller's team has indicted some 26 other people, including 13 Russian nationals (plus three companies) for alleged attempts to influence the 2016 election through propaganda; 12 Russian intelligence operatives for allegedly hacking the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the DCCC, and DNC; and finally Trump associate Roger Stone for allegedly lying to Congress and witness tampering.

Now, only some of these indictments are directly related to the Russia story. However, we can certainly conclude that the Trump operation is simply swimming with criminals. People at all levels in both his campaign and administration have been convicted of felonies, from low-level aides to Trump's top advisers and his personal lawyer — who testified that he lied to Congress about halting the push for a Trump Tower Moscow project in January 2016, "when in fact he pursued it for months after that as Trump campaigned for the presidency."

Just look at this pile of felons — and that's from a probe which was quite limited in focus. One can only imagine what a full-scale investigation into every corner of Trump's administration and business empire would find. Perhaps no president in history has been under such a cloud of criminality.

A functioning democracy would have long since ejected Trump from the presidency and assigned whole divisions of investigators and lawyers to get the truth. (As Richard Nixon once said, "people have gotta know whether or not their president is a crook.") But at the very minimum the American people deserve to know what is in the Mueller report. It might not even be more than is already known — which again is quite a lot — but still, the public should be allowed to see.

Remarkably, Trump himself has said the report should be released. "Let it come out, let people see it," he said Wednesday. "Let’s see whether or not it’s legit."

The president is almost certainly faking transparency. (Remember his promise to release his tax returns?) I would bet quite a large sum he will reverse course and attempt to suppress the report. Even if it's not that bad, it wouldn't take much to offend the vanity of such a titanic narcissist.

But whatever the case, Democrats and American people as a whole — 87 percent of which want the report to be released — must demand to see what Mueller turned up immediately.

This week marked the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, an illegal war of aggression that was also the most purely idiotic foreign policy blunder in American history. The Vietnam debacle may have been bloodier, but at least the "domino theory" with regards to the spread of communism had a certain surface plausibility to the untutored. The Iraq invasion, by contrast, was sheerest madness — the geopolitical equivalent of someone waking up in the hospital with a crowbar through his foot after a three-week PCP bender.

As Americans look ahead to the 2020 race, it's worth asking what we can learn from this historical disaster, especially as neoconservatives attempt to gin up new wars of aggression against places like Iran or Venezuela.

The first lesson is the importance and rarity of sound, realistic judgment on foreign policy — above all in the use of military force. Washington Post columnist Max Boot is right that a big majority of the political class and population at large supported the Iraq War, but the implication is the opposite of what he claims. Far from being a difficult decision that was understandable at the time, this support betrays only that the American political class is suffused with morons and cowards. It also proves how easy it is to buffalo the population into supporting a war using lies and propaganda (especially when those lies go unchallenged by the leaders of the opposition). After all, the constant implication (known inside the administration to be false at the time) that Saddam Hussein was in league with al Qaeda was particularly effective, leading 69 percent of the population to believe he was involved in 9/11.

Still, the war was, without question, one of the easiest policy calls in American history. I was 17 years old in March 2003, and I was dead against the invasion for two reasons: 1. Notable fraud George W. Bush was pushing it; and 2. Even if the claims about nuclear weapons turned out to be true, the logic of mutually assured destruction should apply to Iraq as it did to the Soviet Union.

This reflects no special competence on my part, just the fact that any halfway skeptical teenager outside the suffocating careerism and groupthink of the Washington, D.C., foreign policy establishment could see the case for war made no sense at all.

What stands out most of all today is how the consequences of the invasion turned out to be dramatically worse than even many cynical leftists predicted. Anyone with eyes to see could tell Bush and Dick Cheney's rhetoric about nuclear weapons was duplicitous, but few predicted there would not be any WMD programs — not even chemical or biological weapons. Many thought the occupation would be violent, but not many predicted there would be eight years of apocalyptic guerrilla war, or that chaos would ignite the entire region, or that an even more murderous Islamist terrorist group would rise from the ashes. Or consider cost: In March 2003, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz stated that "We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction." In reality, after accounting for both direct spending and the cost of soldiers' health care, the actual cost of reconstruction will amount to over $2 trillion. Future interest payments could add even more to that number.

This bears directly on the 2020 race, as both Joe Biden and President Trump supported the invasion, while Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and most other Democratic candidates did not. (Trump's assertion that he was against it from the start is a lie. He was weakly in favor beforehand and did not criticize the war effort until August 2004.) Supporting the war ought to be an absolute dealbreaker for anyone who cares about presidential judgment.

That brings me to the second major lesson the 2003 invasion can impart on us today: the value of international institutions. The United Nations Charter (which was duly passed as a treaty by the U.S. Senate) bans wars of aggression outright, stating in Article II that all members "shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered … [they] shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." (That is why the invasion was illegal — indeed, a war crime.)

The reasoning behind this ban on wars of aggression is straightforward — it's right there in the first sentence of the charter: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind[.]" More often than not, the U.S. has treated this foundational principle of the U.N. with contempt, and it simply doesn't have the power to stop us. But it's worth emphasizing this provision is aimed to prevent the devastation of war on both sides — for both aggressor and victim.

That's a lesson the U.S. could badly stand to learn as it considers the possibilities of a new president and Congress. The Iraq invasion did not destroy the U.S., of course, but it was an absolutely senseless waste of lives and resources. We are long past the point where conquering generals can bring back sacks of plunder, as in Roman times. New wars of aggression — like the ones that neoconservatives are trying to manufacture right now — will do nothing but get a lot of people killed at spectacular cost.

Item: The life expectancy of the United States was recently found to have declined for the third straight year, something typically associated with all-out war, economic crises, or political collapse. According to the CIA, as of 2017 the U.S. ranks 42nd among nations for life expectancy, behind Malta and Greece.

Item: The annual United Nations report on the world's happiest nations was released Wednesday, where the U.S. fell from 18th to 19th place. Meanwhile, the happiest country for the second straight year was Finland. Filling out the rest of the top 5 were Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands.

This raises the question: What might the U.S. learn from the world happiness grandmasters? A good place to start would be copy-pasting their economic and social welfare institutions.

On first blush, there are some obvious big differences that almost certainly explain much of the difference. All these nations have extensive welfare states, with universal health care, generous benefits for parents, seniors, disabled people, the unemployed, and so on. If someone in Finland has an accident or run of bad luck, the state will catch them — and it will also help new parents out with the enormous expenses of child-rearing. That means both a better life for people who have kids, lose their job, or get sick, plus lower stress for everyone else who knows society will protect them from misfortune. But in the U.S., with its grossly dysfunctional health-care system and tattered safety net, such events can be personally devastating. For instance, children cause fully 36 percent of U.S. poverty, and some 42 percent of American cancer patients lose their entire life savings after diagnosis.

Anu Partenen testifies that when she moved from Finland to America, she quickly started having panic attacks over health insurance worries.

Additionally, a proper welfare state means all these countries have very low poverty rates. All the top five are in the bottom seven of the OECD poverty rankings, while the U.S. has the third-highest poverty rate among those countries (behind South Africa and Costa Rica). Poverty is both soul-crushing and physically harmful, and certainly drags down the U.S. happiness average.

That in turn raises the issue of general economic inequality. The U.S. has the sixth-highest inequality in the OECD, while Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Denmark have the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh-lowest respectively. That means the top of the U.S. income distribution is very far from the bottom — which again unlike Finland, can easily mean utter destitution.

Inequality creates a sort of social vertigo that harms even people doing quite well. It's surely part of why many middle- and upper-middle class American parents work feverishly to obtain every possible advantage for their children, including sometimes creating vast cheating conspiracies to rig the college admissions process. The consequences of falling even a few steps down the American economic ladder can be catastrophic — but far less so in Finland, where the lowest-paid workers aren't that far from the top-paid ones, and even with a crummy job (or none at all) one still has health care. When most people make fairly similar salaries, there is no need for neurotic "snowplow parenting" — and more room for people to work at what they find fulfilling or enjoyable instead of what pays most.

In another chapter of the happiness report, Jean M. Twenge (author of the techno-phobic iGen) presents some evidence that the rise of the internet, smartphones, and social media may be sapping American happiness, which has declined markedly since the 1970s. There is probably something to this, but on the other hand all the happiest countries also have phones and the internet.

The obvious common-sense reaction to the happiness divergence between the Nordic countries and the U.S. is surely the right one. A highly unequal society with threadbare benefits and extreme negative consequences for bad luck makes its residents unhappy. But one with all sorts of really nice universal goodies, tons of vacation, and low inequality is a nice place to live, and its residents are happier.

After nearly a century of abject failure, the war on drugs is finally slowing down. Presidential candidates are coming out in support of legal cannabis, psychedelic research is finally getting going, and people are discussing reducing sharply the criminal penalties for drug crimes.

But if "war" is our policy model for dealing with drugs, what should replace it? Here's a sensible, moderate proposal: full socialism for drugs. Recreational drugs should be legalized, but only sold through a restrictive government monopoly.

The war on drugs failed, in part, because drugs are easy to produce and smuggle, and there is an extremely strong demand for them. Cocaine, heroin, LSD, and most other other illegal drugs can be produced relatively easily from agricultural products or simple starting reagents, and a small suitcase can contain a huge number of doses (hundreds of billions in the case of LSD). Prohibition merely created a dangerous black market.

The only drug that was successfully banned through the drug war model is methaqualone (better known as quaaludes), as Alex Pareene has pointed out. That's because making methaqualone requires a high-tech industrial laboratory, and the U.S. government forced both domestic and foreign drug companies to stop. But even a police state can't possibly maintain enough control to stop tiny, easily-manufactured shipments from slipping through the cracks, either by way of smugglers or bribes. Meanwhile, the gigantic potential profits involved mean that every time a supplier is caught, several more jump in to take their place.

This accounts for the worst side effects of the drug war: the apocalyptic violence and instability in Latin America and parts of Asia as drug gangs ruthlessly fight the state — and one another — over control of a hugely lucrative trade. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the crossfire.

Legal commercial supply of drugs would solve this problem, but has its own considerable downsides. The bulk of drug profits come from a relatively small fraction of serious addicts, and the tobacco and alcohol industries have been every bit as unscrupulous as Pablo Escobar in cultivating addiction, sowing doubt about their products' deeply harmfulside effects, and lobbying the government to prevent regulations. Indeed, with efficient industrial manufacturing and cutting-edge advertising techniques, they have been considerably more effective than illegal drug dealers at creating large addict populations. The Sackler family stuffing billions of extremely addictive opioid pills into Appalachia — following the Big Tobacco model of deception and lobbying to the letter — provides a recent example, with deadly results.

Big capitalist businesses — which are already starting to roll up the cannabis market — should not be allowed anywhere near this stuff. Above all, drug policy should strive to keep the profit motive far, far away from addictive substances.

A government monopoly is a far better solution. All the downsides of state retail monopolies — somewhat inefficient services, limited sales hours and selection, and so on — are actually advantages when it comes to the drug market. We don't want it to be "efficient." Advertising would be forbidden (indeed, all drug advertising of any kind should be banned, including for prescription drugs), and prices could be kept just high enough to prevent a black market from forming, especially for the most dangerous drugs. States like Pennsylvania and Utah — as well as most of Canada, and all the Nordic countries save Denmark — already have something like this model in place for hard alcohol, and it works reasonably well.

The level of control would vary depending on the substances. Relatively harmless stuff like marijuana, MDMA, most psychedelics, and weak formulations like coca tea, would be over-the-counter for people over the age of 21. Harder drugs like cocaine, morphine, and meth would require a doctor's prescription and be given out to addicts (who should have free drug treatment available, but that's a topic for health-care policy). Ideally hard alcohol and smoked tobacco would go in the latter category, too, since they are just as dangerous as heroin or cocaine. True, they are not as addictive, but they do have worse side effects: Together alcohol and smoked tobacco killabout 570,000 Americans every year. But given how embedded they are in everyday society, they would probably have to go over-the-counter as well.

While this approach would not solve America's addiction problem, it would solve the problem of crime and violence involved in the drug trade, particularly in beleaguered countries like El Salvador and Honduras. Incidentally, legalizing drugs is probably the quickest and easiest way to help stem the flow of refugees trying to escape those countries. If we want to fight addiction, industrial and welfare policy to reduce economic despair in impoverished communities — where most opioid overdoses are concentrated — would be a good place to start.

That's not to say that drug socialism wouldn't target America's addiction problem at all. Addiction reduction can be accomplished through education, restrictive regulations, and so on — witness the rate of smoking, which has fallen by nearly two-thirds since the 1950s. Making the hardest drugs complicated, annoying, and expensive to get one's hands on — while making safer, healthier stuff like cannabis or mushrooms more available to those who just want to get high (which citizens in a free society should be able to do) — could help in this process.

But ultimately, if we want to bring the inevitable drug trade out of the violent criminal underworld, some method of legal supply must be arranged. Good old Big Government is the way to do it.

It seems pretty clear Joe Biden is going to run for president, joining the roughly Graham's Number of declared Democratic candidates so far. As a former vice president, Biden is now part of the global oligarchy, complete with preposterous speaking fees and an extensive entourage, and from that perspective one last run for president probably sounds like a topping idea.

But it will be hard, and possibly catastrophic for his reputation. If he knows what is good for him, Biden shouldn't run.

The most immediate problem for Biden personally is that he has #MeToo written all over him. As my colleague Matthew Walther writes, there are already vast compilations of footage of him being far too handsy with women in public settings. Even if nothing worse comes out, just what is publicly known will make it harder to run against Trump's extensive record of alleged sexual assault.

Setting personal history aside, Biden's actual policy record is probably almost as big of a potential problem. The Democratic Party has shifted markedly to the left over the last decade, as the consequences of the party's policy record from the mid-1970s to 2008 have become clear. The financial crisis made Wall Street deregulation seem like the catastrophic error it in fact was, clockwork police shootings of unarmed African-Americans have shown the enormous harms of the war on crime, the skyrocketing burden of student loans has demonstrated the folly of the 2005 bankruptcy bill, and so on.

This turn is to a great extent a response to Biden's very career, because he was personally involved in almost every bad policy decision of the last 40 years. He pushed the party away from civil rights, starting his career with George Wallace-style duplicitous fearmongering about school integration. Here's an excerpt from a 1975 interview:

The new integration plans being offered are really just quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with; what it says is, "in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son." That's racist! [Biden, via Congressional Record]

I dunno, I could think of more racist things than that, like the terror-enforced Jim Crow caste system that segregationists like Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) worked to protect. Biden, naturally, eulogized Thurmond in 2003.

Biden was a major engine behind mass incarceration, constantly whipping up fear of crime, demanding harsher sentences, and writing bills to that effect. "I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society," he said in a 1993 speech. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, "He wasn’t trying to compromise with the Republicans. This was actually an attempt to get to the right of Republicans."

As a loyal toady of the large corporations (especially finance, insurance, and credit cards) that put their headquarters in Delaware because its suborned government allows them to evade regulations in other states, Biden voted for repeated rounds of deregulation in multiple areas and helped roll back anti-trust policy — often siding with Republicans in the process. He was a key architect of the infamous 2005 bankruptcy reform bill which made means tests much more strict and near-impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.

He also voted for the most idiotic foreign policy blunder in American history — namely the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Then there is the fact that Biden is not very good at campaigning. He's infamously gaffe-prone — which made for an amusing contrast with the preternaturally-controlled Obama, but is also a big part of why both his previous campaigns for president flamed out almost immediately.

Biden currently enjoys the glow from the Obama era, which for all its major flaws was at least not nearly as bad as what we are experiencing under Trump. But if he becomes an official contender, candidates from all sides are going to tear into his hide. Opposition researchers are going to dig up whatever they can find on his personal foibles, and his Democratic competitors are going to savage his record on the war on crime and Wall Street. Elizabeth Warren in particular is guaranteed to attack him over the bankruptcy bill, which she correctly predicted at the time was going to be a disaster.

It's not going to be pretty. If I were him, I'd sit back and enjoy the most comfortable retirement that could possibly be imagined.

The appalling massacre of 49 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Thursday naturally has people around the world looking for explanations. Proximate motivations were not hard to discover. The alleged terrorist, a 28-year-old man from Australia, posted a white supremacist tract online where he lauded President Trump as a "symbol of white identity." He livestreamed the shooting, in which he repeated many white nationalist slogans and recommended that viewers "subscribe to PewDiePie" (YouTube's most popular independent channel, which is somehow constantly getting in trouble for "ironic" racism).

One important aspect of this horror is how the internet enables the spread of genocidal propaganda. Worldwide peer-to-peer communication networks makes it easier than ever for hatred and racist conspiracy theories to spread.

But just as important is the political background. Powerful conservative activists, media figures, and politicians around the world have deliberately stoked hysterical anti-Muslim bigotry for political advantage. It should not be surprising if occasionally some of their supporters follow their words to their logical conclusions.

Ben Shapiro — whose tweets, according to Canadian court documents, were regularly read by Alexandre Bissonnette, the right-wing terrorist who shot up a Quebec mosque — has used ridiculously slanted statistics to argue that the majority of Muslims (or800 million people, by his count) are "radical" terrorist sympathizers. He has also promoted an article he allegedly edited saying that Muslims living in Europe constitute a "disease" and that Muslim men are "uncivilized." David French wrote in National Review in 2015 (again wildly exaggerating the implications of opinion polls) that the Muslim world is "overcome with hate" and that "jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale."

This kind of thinking — many if not most Muslims are terrorists or "radicals," and should be collectively instead of individually judged — is why President Trump has stoked fear about Muslims sneaking across the southern border and proposed (and partly accomplished) banning all Muslim entry into the United States.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) — who, among other things, accused the Obama administration of being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood — implicitly admitted some overlap with the Christchurch terrorist. He argued in a statement not that the murderer's racism was wrong, but that he didn't use the correct channels: "There are courts, dispute resolutions, and legislatures to resolve controversies[.]" Which "controversy" he means is left as an exercise for the reader.

An extreme right-wing Australian senator named Fraser Anning straight-up blamed the victims themselves for the massacre, issuing a statement that read: "The real cause of the bloodshed ... is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place … just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, that does not make them blameless."

This barely-veiled apologia for terrorism conceals a strong political motive. Indeed, this is far from the first time that powerful right-wingers have attempted to stoke bigotry for political advantage. In Imperial Russia in 1911, for instance, the top levels of the tsarist government (including the minister of justice and Tsar Nicholas II himself) conspired to frame a Jewish clerk named Menachem Mendel Beilis for the "ritual murder" of a Ukrainian boy — a classic piece of blood libel anti-Semitism. The actual murderers (who were not Jews) were quickly discovered by police and journalists, but the authorities hushed it up.

The case attracted a storm of international condemnation, but the tsarist regime pressed on with the frame-up. The reason is that the frenzy of hatred served an important political function — namely, building mass popular support for the autocracy. (Luckily for Beilis, the prosecution's case was so shoddy that he was acquitted at trial.)

Similar to how war fever can inspire mass demonstrations of patriotic loyalty, stoking violent anti-Semitism (which produced clockwork bloody pogroms from reactionary "Black Hundreds" militias) provided both some social glue for a right-wing empire and a convenient scapegoat for any problems that cropped up. In the end, it didn't save Imperial Russia, but the truly enormous potential of political bigotry would later be demonstrated by Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Political Islamophobia from Alaska to Australia serves as a key ideological unifier for modern right-wing movements, because they have little policy content which is practically useful for their mass base. Right-wing oligarchs like Trump may not actually roll back globalization, or do any major domestic policy but tax cuts and deregulation, but they can provide a compelling (and wholly fictional) narrative of white civilization under threat. White supremacist terrorism across the whole Western world is just the price to be paid.

It's official: Failed Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke has wedged his lanky frame into the Democratic 2020 clown car! Time to polish up some boots, take a mysterious drive around the country, and stretch out the ol' lower legs.

One promise of the O'Rourke campaign is that he will actually achieve bipartisan compromise. He sells himself as "a youthful uniter, willing to listen and learn from the most recalcitrant right-wing voters and work with Republicans," writes Joe Hagan in a soft-focus Vanity Fair profile. O'Rourke himself touts "my ability to listen to people, to help bring people together to do something that is thought to be impossible."

This bears a marked resemblance to the thinking of Barack Obama, whose presidency could not possibly have been a better demonstration of the impossibility of achieving such a thing. The idea of bipartisan compromise through moderate outreach is simply preposterous. It's nothing more than narcissism.

The initial promise of the 2008 Obama campaign was to achieve a kind of national reconciliation through mass mobilization. Thus "yes we can," "hope and change," and "we are the ones we have been waiting for."

What this actually meant in practice became clear when he took office, as Obama largely dismantled his mass organizing machinery, and installed Wall Street stooge Tim Geithner at the Treasury Department to oversee the response to the financial crisis. Geithner maintained the Bush bank bailouts, and used a slush fund intended to rescue homeowners to help the banks even more. The social carnage was gruesome.

Instead of being the representative of a mobilized constituency for massive change, Obama wanted sheep. He thought he could serve as a personal symbolic figurehead of national reconciliation, with actual policies mainly aimed at restoring the pre-2008 status quo (with a few moderate reforms here and there). Thus Republican buy-in was critical to this process, as it would prove the age of increasing partisan polarization was at an end.

But polarization only accelerated. Republicans responded to the world-historical catastrophe of the Bush administration not with introspection but all-out partisan trench warfare. Senate Republicans filibustered virtually everything — where Obama had hoped for 80-vote Senate majorities for his major bills, he got only a couple defections on occasion.

And it worked! Obstructionist tactics gummed up the wheels of government and helped keep the economy depressed — along with Team Obama's embrace of austerity in early 2010. With unemployment at nearly 10 percent on election day that year, Democrats were blown out of the water and lost control of the House.

Unbelievably, Obama responded to this shattering defeat by doubling down on Republican outreach, leading to the nadir of his presidency in 2011. When the GOP took the debt ceiling hostage that year, threatening national default and world financial Armageddon if they didn't get unrelated policy concessions, Obama attempted a "Grand Bargain" compromise — offering Republicans huge cuts to Social Security and Medicare if only they would agree to a tiny tax increase on the rich. This was appalling both politically and on the merits — rewarding outrageously irresponsible tactics to obtain gruesome policy outcomes. Only maximalist extremism from the House right wing prevented the bargain from being passed.

By his second term, Obama retreated from Republican appeasement, though he continued to defend it in theory to the end of his presidency. "By the end," as David Roth writes at Deadspin, "his presidency had the feeling of a prestige television show in its fifth season — handsomely produced and reliably well-performed but ultimately not really as sure what it was about as it first appeared to be."

Stripped of its rhetorical wrappings, it's becoming clear what O'Rourke represents: himself. Instead of putting forward an aggressive vision to transform the nation's broken political economy, he wants to be the national embodiment of a vaguely Gen X-themed vision quest. His campaign has thus far little policy — and neither do O'Rourke encomiums from former Obama staffers. But he skateboards! He's got a truck and a dog!

It takes enormous self-regard to run for president, but truly titanic narcissism to think one can bridge America's partisan divides through force of personality. It turns out that conservatives have deep ideological disagreements with liberals and leftists about how the country should be governed. The way to get past them is to defeat them.

Presidents, ideally speaking, have two sorts of duties. The first is pursuing one's political agenda, within constitutional norms: passing bills to boost or cut social welfare spending, adjusting regulations, fiddling with taxes, and so on. Then there are the daily maintenance tasks to keep the machinery of state ticking over: staffing the national bureaucracy with quality employees, maintaining national defense and infrastructure, dealing with natural disasters, and so on.

Obviously these are ideal categories and will tend to overlap in any presidency. But the recent story of Boeing's troubled new 737 Max 8 jet demonstrates without question that President Trump is absolutely wretched at the latter tasks. He doesn't care about the job and couldn't do it even if he tried. American lives are in danger as a result.

Two of the Max 8 planes have crashed in the last six months, one in Indonesia and one in Ethiopia this week. Worse, the crashes may be due to defects in the plane, not pilot error. It turns out that at least five U.S. pilots have complained about janky systems on the Max 8, one of which noting autopilot troubles of the sort that may have led to the Ethiopia crash:

For one U.S. incident in November 2018, a commercial airline pilot reported that during takeoff, the autopilot was engaged and "within two to three seconds the aircraft pitched nose down," in a manner steep enough to trigger the plane's warning system, which sounded "Don't sink, don't sink!" After the autopilot was disengaged, the plane climbed as normal, according to the report. [Politico]

Now, airline travel is still extremely safe. But the reason it is safe is because of a complex and extremely effective regulatory bureaucracy in almost every country in the world, whose operations have been carefully coordinated over decades. That is why Max 8's have been grounded across almost the whole world. If one wants to keep air travel safe, it's important to keep on top of these sorts of problems. "The autopilot sometimes crashes the plane" is a possibility that must be either ruled out or corrected.

But not in Trump's America! At time of writing, the U.S. is the only major country in the world where Max 8's continue to fly. They're grounded in Canada, China, the E.U., South America, and Africa. And why is that? It probably has something to do with Boeing CEO Dennis A. Muilenburg calling up Trump and promising the plane is safe. (The fact that grounding the new plane would cost Boeing a ton of money is just a slight side detail, no doubt.) Muilenburg has also visited Mar-a-Lago, and Boeing donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, which is under criminal investigation for corruption.

It's also worth noting that the Federal Aviation Administration still has no officially confirmed chief, as Trump tried for months to get his personal pilot appointed to the job, only recently giving up and reportedly picking a former airline executive instead.

The remarkable thing about this is that it puts rich and powerful people in potential danger. Only the very wealthiest can afford to fly private or charter jets — everyone else, including members of Congress (who are constantly flying back and forth to their districts) flies commercial. And it doesn't matter whether you pay for first class and Premium Platinum Executive Sapphire early boarding or whatever, if the plane goes down you are the exact same smoking cinder as the proles in economy class.

But Trump gets a call from one rich CEO who has given him lots of money, and he goes along with it (and naturally, he's got Air Force One to carry him around). He seems to be convinced the problem is too much technology on planes, writingon Twitter that "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly … I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!"

God only knows where he picked up that idea, but it's a safe bet he's completely out to lunch.

At any rate, it's an object lesson for what happens when you put an incurious reality TV star in the presidency of the United States. It turns out the political leader of the world's most powerful nation actually carries some important responsibilities — and Donald Trump just can't do the job.

Since Ta-Nehisi Coates published his landmark article "The Case for Reparations," the idea of paying the descendants of slaves some sort of compensation has been a regular area of discussion. It has come up in the 2020 Democratic primary contest, with numerous candidates expressing at least rhetorical support. Three candidates so far have come out in favor. Elizabeth Warren says: "We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country." Kamala Harris says: "I'm serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities." Julian Castro endorsed the policy more recently, saying, "I have long thought that this country would be better off if we did find a way to do that."

But there is reason to doubt the seriousness of these sentiments. There is a huge need for something like reparations, but so far none of these candidates has evinced anything like the ferocious radicalism that would require.

At a basic level, the case for some kind of reparations is strong. It is simply inarguable that black Americans have faced systematic economic looting throughout American history. Slave labor created enormous profits for white businesses across the antebellum U.S., not just the South — indeed, Wall Street ran a huge trade in slave-backed securities and other instruments. Under Jim Crow, blacks were basically enserfed, with similar extractive results. Blacks were frozen out of many key New Deal economic structures, especially government-insured home loans — the key route to middle-class wealth after the Second World War.

Even when blacks got some access to mortgage finance after the Civil Rights Movement, they still faced discrimination up to this day — indeed, they suffered worst of all major race groups from the botched response to the post-2008 foreclosure crisis, which devastated black wealth. While Wall Street was bailed out, the fraction of black homeowners underwater on their mortgages increased by 20-fold from 2007-2013, and average black home equity is still down $16,700 from its 2007 peak as of 2016.

Those inequalities transmit themselves down the generations, through inheritance and ongoing racism. That history and reality is why there is such an enormous wealth gap between white and black Americans — $146,200 (or a 9.8-fold difference) measured at the median, or $760,700 (or a 6.4-fold difference) measured as an average.

So if we take one primary goal of reparations as closing the black-white wealth gap (as some advocates have proposed), the amounts involved would be very, very large. For instance, one estimate of Cory Booker's "baby bond" proposal — which would build up a social wealth fund of about $700 billion, and then pay out a means-tested lump sum to people turning 18 — found it would nearly close the median wealth gap.

That is a big policy. But even if that analysis is true, it would still miss the bulk of the wealth gap, because the median of any race group holds only a small fraction of its total wealth. If we want to adjust total wealth such that blacks would own a white-equivalent share relative to their fraction of the population, we would need to move $15.2 trillion (or 17.5 percent of total wealth) — either by giving blacks that much directly, or taking $7.6 trillion from whites. On the other hand, if you try to calculate the current worth of stolen slave labor, the result is roughly between $1.75 trillion and $12.5 quadrillion.

This reluctance is probably also motivated by the fact that reparations poll extremely badly. A 2016 Marist poll found 68 percent of American adults are against the idea, while Data Progress found it 21 points underwater. Even working-class people of color only supported it by 15 points in the latter poll. It's likely a safe bet than any actual worked-out $15 trillion bill would be a lot more unpopular than that.

But if that's the case, then why are these candidates even bothering with rhetorical support? If you're trying to move the public with forthright advocacy of a bold policy, that's one thing, but endorsing the idea only to retreat when the scale of the problem becomes clear is quite another. Far better to be straight with the public and simply admit that it's not within the realm of political possibility as you see it. Casting facially race-neutral egalitarian policy like the EITC as reparations is perhaps worst of all, as it doesn't actually achieve the goals in question while associating it with a very unpopular idea.

If Democrats think reparations need to happen, then let's have that debate. But don't give us penny-ante moderation cloaked in radical symbolism.

Remember blogs? It seemed for a short time in the mid-2000s and early 2010s that this would become a viable business model for all manner of independent publishers and writers. But with few exceptions, that model of publishing is dead. What killed blogs was the rise of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which sucked much independent writing into walled gardens, and more importantly, the consolidation of the Facebook-Google internet advertising duopoly. Thousands of viable medium-to-small websites were driven out of business by this development, and thousands more were forced into a fundraising or subscription model, not always successfully.

That's a good road into Elizabeth Warren's new proposal to break up and regulate Big Tech. Google, Facebook, and Amazon have rolled up great swathes of the internet economy (and obtained vast political power in the process). It's long since time they were cut down to size.

Even venture capitalists say there is a "kill zone" around the big five tech companies (the other two are Microsoft and Apple) where nobody bothers to fund any start-up, because a newcomer can't possibly compete. As Warren writes, "The number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22 percent since 2012."

She suggests two basic solutions. First, reverse anti-competitive mergers. Facebook should have to sell Instagram and WhatsApp; Google would have to sell Waze, Nest, and DoubleClick; and Amazon would have to sell Whole Foods and Zappos. That's straightforward anti-trust policy.

Second, regulate the platforms: Warren would designate any online business with more than $25 billion in world revenue and which offers "an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties," as a "platform utility." These would be forbidden from owning any company that participates in the platform, and would have common carrier-style regulations requiring "fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users" — thus banning the sort of supplier squeeze move noted above. They would also be forbidden from transferring data to third parties.

Finally, these smaller businesses would be less politically powerful. With less money, they would find it harder to subvert democracy by pressuring cities and states for outrageous bribes, less able to lobby Congress for special exemptions and tax breaks, and less able to exploit their strategic market position for political effect.

This is classic Brandeisian policy, which was central to the New Deal order that produced the most prosperous and egalitarian period in American history in the three decades after the Second World War. The idea is to force market competition to happen along socially positive axes of quality and price, rather than who can finance the most predatory tactics on Wall Street.

A powerful piece of the argument for tech anti-trust is the relative lack of downsides. In any policy discussion, one must consider the possibility of negative side effects. But suppose all the above arguments turn out to be mistaken. In that worst-case scenario, we would only have a somewhat more fragmented technology marketplace. Forcing WhatsApp and Instagram to become their own separate companies would only revert things to how they were before Facebook bought them — barely even a disruption, much less a disaster. Forcing Amazon to hive off its retail operation from its platform operation wouldn't break online shopping — retail businesses have thrived for hundreds of years without also owning a massive retail platform.

The only people who would unquestionably lose out here would be the tech baron CEOs, who would be running smaller companies and thus receive somewhat smaller salaries and compensation. But something tells me they won't end up on the street.

The chances of a great outcome are strong, and the chances of a bad one are minimal — so why not? It's a total gimmie.

As Warren notes, this wouldn't solve all the problems on the internet. But it would go some distance towards revitalizing the tech sector, and restoring democratic control over these dangerous monopolists. Let's make it happen.

The Democratic leadership is in hot water over Israel. The issue is a controversy over Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who attended a recent event with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) about the influence of the Israel lobby and the plight of the Palestinians. In response to a question about the cynical use of anti-Semitism accusations to shut down criticism of Israel, she said, "I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country."

The accusations of anti-Semitism instantly rolled in, and now the Democratic leadership is considering a resolution condemning Omar, associating her with a lot of baldly anti-Semitic rhetoric she never said. Facing a backlash, they have since delayed the vote and may alter the resolution.

This demonstrates the increasing divergence between the Democratic leadership's knee-jerk deference to Israel and its ruling party Likud, and growing skepticism from the Democratic rank-and-file. It can't last forever.

People disagree about whether Omar's comments went afoul of tropes about Jews having "dual loyalty." She has refused to apologize, while emphasizing that "[w]e must be willing to combat hate of all kinds while also calling out oppression of all kinds. I will do my best to live up to that. I hope my colleagues will join me in doing the same." For my part, I do not remotely believe there was anti-Semitic intent behind what she said. As Jordan Weismann suggests, "The more likely explanation for these statements is that she’s an inexperienced politician who arrived at the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia at age 12 and probably came of age in left-wing circles where vocal opposition to Israel was the norm, and there wasn’t a lot of thought given to words that Jews consider anti-Semitic dog whistles."

More importantly, contrary to the accusations of many conservative and liberal Israel supporters, Omar did not say Jews were pushing for an allegiance to Israel, as Glenn Greenwald writes. It's an important distinction. Due to the fact that Jews are only a small fraction of the U.S. population, the vast majority of die-hard American Likud partisans are actually evangelical Christians (incidentally, many of whom support Israel due to their belief that the Book of Revelations prophesies that before the apocalypse can happen, all Jews must be gathered together in Israel).

That said, I do believe she didn't think through what she was saying. As Eric Levitz writes, why shouldn't America have a close alliance or relationship with another country? (Many leftists, including myself, have argued the U.S. should get closer to the Nordic social democracies.)

The problem is not "allegiance" (whatever that means) as such, it is allegiance to Israel, because it maintains political control over 4.8 million people in the West Bank and Gaza who have no vote in their government and few other political rights. Gaza in particular is an open-air prison, strangled economically by an Israeli blockade (structured to benefit Israeli businesses), regularly bombed by Israeli jets, with snipers at the ready to shoot anyone who approaches the prison fence — including civilians and journalists.

Likud, meanwhile, is an extremely right-wing force closely associated with other right-wing parties around the world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who has held office since 2009, as well as from 1996-1999) has been carefully cultivating virulently racist authoritarians in Eastern Europe for international political support, up to and including overt anti-Semites.

In keeping with this strategy, Netanyahu has been meddling increasingly openly in American politics, trying hard to get Mitt Romney elected in 2012 and taking up the Republican invitation to deliver a speech to Congress in an effort to dynamite former President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.

Unsurprisingly, the wide streak of anti-Semitism in the Republican Party does not impede this relationship either. Netanyahu didn't ditch the GOP over a Trump ad saying rich Jews (George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein) control the levers of global politics. He didn't either when Trump said the white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally at Charlottesville — where torch-wielding mobs chanted "Jews will not replace us," and where a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of leftist demonstrators, wounding 35 people and killing one — contained "very fine people."

Nor did he when a Trump supporter — clearly inspired by constant Republican demonization — allegedly sent a mail bomb to Soros' house. Nor did he when another right-wing extremist, who espoused the Republican conspiracy theory that Soros was conniving to bring Muslims refugees into the U.S., massacred 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue. (Also, somehow Republicans who are baying "anti-Semite" at Omar failed to get so worked up over Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) calling Jewish Democratic donor Tom Steyer "$teyer" in a tweet).

.@anncoulter tweets re: Jews awful, nonsensical. @anncoulter is also super pro-Israel, and has always been so, so I won't lose sleep.

Finally, there are the allegations of corruption. Netanyahu will reportedly be indicted soon on charges of bribery and "breach of trust" stemming from alleged government payouts to obtain positive media coverage and luxury goods. (There is an election in Israel on April 9.)

If the Democratic leadership wanted to have some sensitivity training or something to make sure that Palestinian advocates framed their arguments properly, few people would complain. But instead, they are powerfully demonstrating that in fact the Democratic political leadership is enormously biased towards Israel, against Palestinians, and that is the primary motivation behind their criticism of Omar. Some are not at all subtle about it — as Rep Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter: "It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community. Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable." Senate Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) previously said outright at an AIPAC conference that there is no peace in Israel because Arabs "don't believe in the Torah."

But Netanyahu's government and constant electoral activism against the Democratic Party has seriously poisoned the reputation of Israel among ordinary Democrats. Where in 2008 about half of Democrats used to sympathize with that country, only about 27 percent do so as of 2018. Why wouldn't they?

Events like this are only going to further expand the divisions between the leadership and the party base. Why on Earth are they circling the wagons to protect a horribly unjust country run by a guy who serves as a Republican operative? If the Israeli government is going to work hand-in-glove with the GOP to undermine the Democrats, perhaps they don't deserve absolute deference from the latter party — or even $38 billion in military subsidies. And if the leadership keeps letting themselves get jerked around like this, more and more will conclude that it's time for some fresh faces at the top.

Climate change has vaulted to the top of the political discourse, with the rollout of the Green New Deal policy framework and the subsequent discussion of what policies it should contain. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), for instance, recently announced he is running for president with a platform laser-focused on climate change.

All this has political moderates rolling their eyes. "The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it right?" scoffed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) scolded a bunch of children who came to her office begging her to support the Green New Deal, saying "I know what I'm doing … it's not a good resolution." New York Times columnist Bret Stephens concludes that if famed lefty Pelosi doesn't support it, the GND must be basically silly: "[I]t's time to move climate policy beyond impractical radicalism and feckless virtue-signaling to something that can achieve a plausible, positive, and bipartisan result."

All this reveals the bankruptcy of so-called "realism" on climate change.

The remarkable thing about Stephens' column is that he perceives the problem with the Democratic moderate climate stance with perfect accuracy. Unlike Stephens in his Wall Street Journal incarnation, Feinstein and Pelosi do not deny the science of climate change. But if the scientists are right, "isn't Pelosi's incrementalist approach to climate absurdly inadequate?" he writes. "Isn't it, in fact, like trying to put out a forest fire with a plant mister?"

Yep! But contrary to Stephen's conclusion that Pelosi's political reasoning must be correct, one can easily accept climate science while refusing to accept the obvious policy implications — that we need radical policy to wrench down emissions as fast as possible. It is its own version of climate denial, in a sense.

This kind of behavior is nothing new. When confronted with severe crises, people often retreat to avoidance strategies, thinking up excuses to procrastinate or deny the problem is as bad as it is. In the mid-1930s, European statesmen and citizens alike simply refused to believe that Hitler was a genocidally racist megalomaniac bent on world domination, despite the fact that he had clearly written as much in his own book. U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's infamous appeasement at Munich was an error in this vein, but only because the U.K. public desperately hoped to avoid an inescapable war (and the U.K. was not remotely prepared for one in 1938). Even Stalin refused to believe dozens of warnings from his own intelligence and the British that the Nazis were planning a surprise attack in June 1941.

Andrew Sullivan of all people understands this point, writing that on climate, "Splitting the difference right now between the GOP and the Democrats on this subject is to guarantee eco-suicide. And since it is an emergency, gradualism is not, shall we say, optimal."

Yet he makes his own mistake, writing that nuclear power can be a climate panacea. He is correct that in theory nuclear could completely de-carbonize power generation — though the cost problems are considerably worse than he allows, with a recent nuclear plant going so over budget that it bankrupted Westinghouse and had to be abandoned even with considerable subsidies.

But more importantly, nuclear does nothing for agriculture, industry, and manufacturing, which account for almost half of emissions and have no zero-carbon technological solutions ready for deployment.

And this gets to the problem with the Stephens-Pelosi-Feinstein thinking on climate. If we consider climate policy realistically, then that would clearly involve considering how big the problem is, reasoning from there how fast emissions need to come down, and then what policies could get us there. If the scientists are overstating their case, then why, and by how much? If the greens are wrong about policies, which ones are better? But Stephens does not discuss details in the slightest, only gesturing vaguely towards "large-scale investments in climate resilience, such as better coastal defenses." How about it, Bret: Would it be cheaper to decarbonize the economy, or abandon the whole of the Miami metro area to the rising seas?

But conversely, this is why the Green New Deal framework makes so much sense. It starts with the problem — greenhouse gas emissions — and sets up a goal to get them down in time, while making society more egalitarian in the process. The policy space, therefore, is ecumenical. Nothing that cuts emissions is ruled out — leaving space for a carbon tax, subsidies for zero-carbon transportation, enormous investment in zero-carbon energy (including nuclear), and moon-shot research investments to develop zero-carbon industry and agriculture that could then be adopted worldwide.

I daresay it's a fairly pragmatic approach. If you study the conclusions of climate science even cursorily, the truth is that we have procrastinated so long that we pretty much have to go full-tilt at everything with a decent chance of getting emissions down. Penny-ante political moderation can not possibly get the job done.

President Trump's self-image is that of the master negotiator. "Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals," he wrote in 2014. But like the image itself, which is more the product of ghostwriters and reality TV producers than it is any actual business record, Trump's actual skill at negotiation is appallingly poor. He is very probably the worst deal-maker in the history of the American presidency.

Trump's latest negotiation faceplant came in Vietnam, where he sat down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ostensibly to reach some kind of arrangement about cutting back their nuclear program in return for easing up on sanctions. But after only two days, Trump abruptly walked out of the meeting, complaining that Kim's opening ask — full removal of sanctions in return for dismantling one nuclear installation — was too much.

Now, one must admit the failure to achieve a lasting peace settlement here is quite unfortunate, if unsurprising. Finally formally ending the Korean War, defusing some of the tension between North and South Korea, and alleviating some of the terrible material deprivation among North Koreans would have been a great achievement.

But Trump was never going to get it done himself. One likely problem is Trump's bone-deep ignorance and total lack of curiosity about anything other than himself. Diplomatic negotiation — particularly over a charged and complicated topic like nuclear weapons — takes extreme attention to detail. A lead negotiator needs both a whole battalion of experts and enough technical competence to be able to understand the parameters of debate. You may not have to understand the physics of uranium purification, but you must understand more-or-less what it means to have an enrichment centrifuge.

This is partly why presidents typically hand off such negotiations to professionals. President Obama didn't handle the Iran nuclear deal negotiations himself, he allowed then-Secretary of State John Kerry — who had vastly greater international experience — to take the lead. (This also diminished the polarizing effect Obama's personal presence would have had.)

But not only is Trump absolutely free of relevant expertise, he is stupendously lazy. When then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was attempting to explain the (relatively simple) Republican health-care bill to Trump in 2017, he got bored after 15 minutes and wandered out to watch TV, according to former Trump communications aide Cliff Sims.

Trump's god-awful negotiation skills were also on display during the recent government shutdown. For one thing, the argument he put forward was nonsensical on its face — the number of people crossing the border has fallen steadily, most unauthorized immigrants overstay visas, and Trump's requested $5 billion would only build a few dozen miles of border fence in any case. But worse in negotiation terms was timing — he had had two years of a Republican Congress to get some wall money, and he almost certainly could have gotten it at some point then. But it was only after Democrats blew him out of the water in the 2018 midterms — in an election fought in large part over Trump's refugee fearmongering — that he decided to pick a fight over the wall and shut down the government.

As could have been predicted from the start, Trump eventually caved completely. People who know Trump from his business career are well familiar with his classic bully psychology. He loves to dominate and exploit the powerless — like the small businesses and contractors he routinely stiffed in his real estate projects. But when faced with a powerful adversary, he typically folds like a wet noodle.

This gets to the heart of what Trump really is: a spoiled rich baby. His father coddled him beyond belief, indulging his every whim and reportedly handing him some $413 million in real estate assets starting from when he was a toddler. These were sharply undervalued to avoid inheritance taxes, according to a New York Times investigation. His father also reportedly gave Trump repeated loans and gifts when his business enterprises repeatedly went pear-shaped — sometimes reportedly illegally, as when his father bailed out one of his Atlantic City casinos with an illegal $3.4 million loan (by buying that much in chips). But a few years after Fred Trump died in 1999, Donald reportedly pressured his siblings to quickly liquidate most of the rest of his father's real estate empire, contrary to his dying wishes — and only got $738 million for assets the bank that financed the purchase valued at almost $1 billion. Another beautiful deal!

Not to worry, the president now says he's optimistic about solving another thorny geopolitical conflict, the Israel-Palestine conflict. "They say it’s like the impossible deal … I would love to be able to produce it. We will see what happens," he said. We will indeed.